Montgomery, Ala., and Montgomery County, Md. — Same battle, same day

Mahmoud v. Taylor is before the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) and the ruling will set precedent on the cause of parental rights for the nation.

The fact that any precedent must be set to affirm and support a parent’s right to oversee what their child sees/reads/digests in education is mind-boggling. Yet, here we are, and Alabama knows the situation all too well, as battles to remove explicit and offensive material from our state’s libraries are being waged even as I write.

The SCOTUS oral arguments held Tuesday center around the state of Maryland’s Montgomery County school board, which denied the right of religious parents to remove their children from this type of indoctrination and influence.

“The court held oral arguments for Mahmoud v. Taylor, which involves parents in Montgomery County who sued their own school board over an alleged violation of their religious liberty,” Fox News Baltimore reports. “The lawsuit was filed in 2023 after the Montgomery County Board of Education (MCBE) denied parents a choice to opt out their children from a list of LGBT books provided through its language arts curriculum. The books cover topics such as gender transitions, pride parades, and the use of different pronouns.”

The report continues:

The group of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish parents in Montgomery County is represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which argued at the Supreme Court that parents have a right to oversee what their children learn at public schools through opt outs.

Once again, the fact that parents have the right to monitor and control what their children are learning should not even be a question. However, the locus of this debate has defined the past several years of what I call the “Alabama Library Wars.”

As 1819 News reported, the Alabama Public Library Services (APLS) director Nancy Pack was relieved of her position due in large part to her anemic and often combative response to juveniles having access to sexually offensive and inappropriate material in the state libraries. In 2024, at the directive of Gov. Kay Ivey, the APLS Board altered the administrative rules to regulate the placement of material deemed explicit or sexually charged. Thus far, the Fairhope Library system has not complied, and their funding has been halted, while the 2025 Alabama Legislature has filed and debated many bills attempting to address this controversy.

From Scottsboro to Spanish Fort, parents and advocates have been rising up on both sides of the issue. Moms for Liberty Alabama leaders in Baldwin County and Northern Alabama have been raising the alarm and taking action to combat it.

“While some citizens believed parents should be responsible for what their children read, others pleaded to library and city officials to ensure their children would not be inadvertently exposed to books discussing sex, rape, anal play, butt plugs and same-sex activity, and showing images of penises and vaginas,” Erica Thomas reported for 1819 News.

Many people asked how these books had ended up in the library in the first place. Some had been on the shelves for nearly five years without question. Many were camouflaged with colorful illustrations and seemingly harmless titles. Others blatantly advertised teaching children how to engage in sexual activity.

On the opposing side, Read Freely Alabama claims the Alabama Library Wars are much ado about nothing, crying that recent actions qualify as book banning. They reject that any of these books need to be reclassified or removed from children’s access.

Why the children? I asked this question back in 2024 while covering a meeting of the Athens-Limestone Library Board, who, unlike the example of Fairhope, made efforts to conform its administrative rules with those of the APLS. We live in an age where access to almost anything can be easily obtained. So, this Read Freely cry of book bans is utter hogwash. If the book is available, even if it’s in the adult section rather than the children’s section, then it isn’t banned. The only restriction to access is to children who do not have the maturity or capacity to appropriately process this type of exposure. As Moms for Liberty (M4L) Baldwin County head Rebecca Watson has stated, the aim of M4L is not to ban books, but relocate those not following the APLS regulations from the library’s children/juvenile sections to the adult section where they belong.

If these library wars were simply over book content or classification, it would not be getting the fire or the funding from outside groups who do not hold Alabama’s values. This is how you know it boils down to this issue: Who controls the hearts and souls of your children – you, or the administrative state?