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I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Tomorrow night.

We’re going to livestream an 8pm interview between Isaac and Kmele Foster, our new Editor-at-Large, to discuss Kmele’s piece on the 2020 racial reckoning. We want to involve readers and listeners in this conversation, so if you have a question for Kmele about his piece, you can submit it here.

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Quick hits.

1. Senate debate and voting on the One Big Beautiful Bill continued overnight and into Tuesday morning. A final vote is expected imminently. (The latest)
2. The Trump administration informed Harvard University that it had determined the school violated federal civil-rights law over its treatment of Jewish and Israeli students. The administration said the school’s federal funding is at risk if it does not take steps to remedy the issue. (The report)
3. The Supreme Court agreed to revisit a 2001 ruling that upheld federal limits on coordinated campaign spending. The case was brought by the National Republican Congressional Committee, then-Sen. JD Vance and former Rep. Steve Chabot (R), who argue that the law violates the First Amendment. (The case)
4. The Boulder County District Attorney's Office announced that Karen Diamond, 82, had passed away from injuries suffered in the flamethrower attack against members of a Jewish community group in June. (The announcement)
5. President Donald Trump signed an executive order removing most U.S. sanctions on Syria, which had been in place since the 1970s. (The order)

Today’s topic.

Mahmoud v. Taylor. On Friday, the Supreme Court voted 6–3 in favor of a group of Maryland parents who had wanted to opt their elementary-aged children out of instruction that included LGBTQ+ themes. The majority agreed to grant the parents a preliminary injunction while their lawsuit proceeds in lower courts, allowing them to withhold their children from such curriculum. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.

Back up: In 2022, Montgomery County’s public school system introduced “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks into its English Language Arts curriculum for elementary school students after Maryland adopted new rules to promote “educational equity.” The district initially allowed parents to opt their children out of lessons involving picture books that included LGBTQ+ content and themes, but it reversed that policy in 2023, saying that the opt-outs had become “unworkable.”

A group of Muslim, Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox parents then sued the school district, saying the new policy violated their First Amendment rights to freedom of religion. Lower courts ruled against the group, finding that the students’ participation did not compel parents to violate their religions. The parents appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in late April.

Friday’s decision reversed the lower courts’ rulings, finding that the district’s policy unduly burdens parents’ religious exercise. The court ruled that the parents had shown both that they were likely to succeed on the merits of their case and likely to suffer irreparable harm if not granted a preliminary injunction. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the school board “requires teachers to instruct young children using storybooks that explicitly contradict their parents’ religious views, and it encourages the teachers to correct the children and accuse them of being ‘hurtful’ when they express a degree of religious confusion.” Furthermore, Alito found that the nature of the Maryland law required the court to apply “strict scrutiny” to the case.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, arguing that the majority’s opinion “ushers in [a] new reality” wherein “children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs.” She wrote that the court had “invent[ed] a constitutional right to avoid exposure to ‘subtle’ themes ‘contrary to the religious principles,’” which “strikes at the core premise of public schools: that children may come together to learn not the teachings of a particular faith, but a range of concepts and views that reflect our entire society.”

Alito refuted this characterization, referring to Sotomayor’s view as “a chilling vision of the power of the state to strip away the critical right of parents to guide the religious development of their children.”

Today, we’ll break down arguments from the right and left on the decision. Then, my take.

What the right is saying.

• The right praises the majority’s opinion, framing it as a win for parents' rights.
• Some criticize the lower courts for adopting a narrow view of religious freedom that the Supreme Court rejected.
• Others say the school district failed because it tried to advance a plainly ideological agenda.

National Review’s editors called the decision “a Supreme Court victory for parental rights in the woke wars.”

“ Mahmoud v. Taylor is a standout case for parental rights, especially as lower courts and parents nationwide try to stop public schools from effectively proselytizing on issues related to gender identity, sexuality, and more. The parents, and their Becket Fund for Religious Liberty representation, deserve widespread applause for standing up to the woke, incredibly well-funded behemoth that is Montgomery County Public Schools,” the editors wrote. “It is particularly valuable that the Court explicitly acknowledged, a decade after Obergefell v. Hodges, that its 5–4 decision in that case does not constitute an official public orthodoxy that the government is entitled to impress upon young children.”

“To their shame, the county’s public-school officials maintained that forcing children to learn material that asserted, for instance, that doctors ‘guess’ when determining a baby’s sex was acceptable,” the editors said. “Throughout the course of its legal battle, MCPS showed just how dedicated it was to dogmatic, left-wing ideology. MCPS took up this case as a culture-war battle. Parents, notably, didn’t object in court to the district’s stated goals of diversity and tolerance; they simply asked for the right to remove their children from lessons that contradict their religious beliefs.”

In The Daily Signal, Thomas Jipping and Daniel Davidson said the ruling “means parents can follow their faith in raising children.”

“The district and appeals courts denied their request by utilizing a very narrow concept of what burdens religious exercise. Nothing short of the government compelling someone to abandon their religious beliefs, they said, can burden the exercise of religion—a standard that reduces the ‘exercise’ of religion to little more than private religious beliefs or perhaps formal religious worship,” Jipping and Davidson wrote. “The First Amendment prohibits an ‘establishment of religion’ and protects the ‘free exercise’ of religion. The Constitution’s framers thought of religious establishment narrowly and religious exercise broadly.”

“Many parents have no choice but to send their children to a public school, a decision that should not require them to surrender their constitutional right,” Jipping and Davidson said. “As Alito pointed out, these materials are ‘unmistakenly normative,’ designed to promote certain values and beliefs and to discourage others regarding sexuality and gender. The threat to parents’ ability to guide their children’s instruction on such sensitive matters is obvious… Thankfully, the Supreme Court has never adopted the narrow, crabbed view of religious freedom.”

In The Baltimore Sun, Jeffrey S. Trimbath wrote the “Supreme Court affirmed what Maryland parents have always known.”

“The government does not have the authority to override parents when it comes to shaping a child’s moral, religious and sexual development. And when public schools attempt to do so — especially behind parents’ backs — they cross both legal and ethical lines,” Trimbath said. “The court agreed. In doing so, it reinforced nearly a century of precedent — from Meyer v. Nebraska to Pierce v. Society of Sisters to Troxel v. Granville — that affirms the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children. This is not just a matter of religious liberty, though that is a central concern. It’s a matter of basic human dignity and trust.”

“This case was never about banning books or stigmatizing students. It was about the rights of parents to educate their children according to their values. If Montgomery County truly wanted to honor the diversity of its communities, it would have created materials that reflect a wide range of views — not just those aligned with progressive sexual ideologies — and provided opt-outs for parents whose sincerely held religious views differ. Instead, the program selectively promoted one viewpoint while silencing others, effectively teaching children that religious beliefs about sexuality and gender are outdated or even hateful.”

What the left is saying.

• The left is critical of the decision, with many suggesting it imposes the religious views of a few on the entire public school system.
• Some say the ruling contains key ambiguities that could have far-reaching consequences.
• Others suggest progressives are choosing the wrong fights to bring to the court.

In Slate, Heidi Li Feldman said the ruling means “some Americans have a Constitutional right to insist on theocracy.”

“With its decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the court licensed private parties to compel theocratic governmental policies. These will now proliferate, at the command of private actors and with scarcely any overt governmental action,” Feldman wrote. “There have been other times in this country’s history when private actors have sought to impose their antidemocratic visions of the United States on the rest of us. Then, Congress passed still-operative laws empowering their victims to sue in court and recover damages for harms they suffered. In our day, the highest federal court in the land has responded by announcing, without any basis in law, that some Americans have a constitutional right to insist on theocracy.”

“People hold and attempt to instruct their children in all manner of religious beliefs. Some atheists maintain that belief in the existence of a supernatural deity is dangerously antithetical to ideals of human dignity,” Feldman said. “Yet it seems unlikely that the six-justice Mahmoud majority is prepared to require schools to provide notice and opt-out accommodations to these parents or, in the alternative, remove from the curriculum and the classroom books ranging from Ten Little Christmas Presents to Once Upon an Eid to Happy Diwali!.”

In Vox, Ian Millhiser argued “the Supreme Court just imposed a ‘ Don’t Say Gay’ regime on every public school in America.”

“The Mahmoud case highlights the Republican justices’ impatience to remake constitutional law in a more socially conservative image, especially in cases involving religion. It is certainly possible for public school instruction to violate a religious child’s constitutional rights,” Millhiser wrote. “The Constitution, for example, forbids government institutions like public schools from coercing students into violating their religious views. As Justice Samuel Alito notes in the Mahmoud opinion, the Constitution would also forbid teachers from openly mocking a student’s faith.”

“While it is somewhat unclear how Mahmoud applies to parents who object to fantasy novels or working women, the decision quite clearly limits schools’ ability to teach books with queer characters. Nor is it clear when a book crosses the line from merely mentioning a gay character to celebrating some aspect of gay culture. So schools that want to avoid lawsuits will need to exclude these sorts of books from their classroom altogether,” Millhiser said. “The Supreme Court, in other words, has decided that in order to accommodate one identity group — religious conservatives — schools should be hypercautious about teaching books that feature members of another identity group — LGBTQ+ people.”

In The Atlantic, Duncan Hosie wrote “liberals are going to keep losing at the Supreme Court.”

“For many progressives… ambitious, doctrinaire, Republican-appointed justices are systematically dismantling liberal precedents over the impassioned but impotent dissents of their Democratic-appointed colleagues… [This account] obscures a difficult truth: Progressive lawyers paved the road to these losses,” Hosie said. “ Mahmoud v. Taylor offers a cautionary tale of initial liberal wins turning into bigger defeats… From the outset of litigation, the school district should have seen the warning signs. The Becket Fund, a powerhouse religious-liberty organization that has won eight (and lost zero) Supreme Court cases in the past decade, represented the parents in their suit.”

“A strategic retreat — restoring the opt-out and pursuing legal maneuvers to moot the case, including after the Court granted certiorari — would have shown prudence, not capitulation,” Hosie wrote. “Instead, the district pressed on. Its temporary wins at the trial and appellate stages then teed up the Supreme Court reversal that has now reshaped constitutional doctrine nationwide. In ruling for the parents, the Roberts Court extended a nearly unbroken streak of favoring free-exercise claimants, largely conservative Christians.”

My take.

Reminder: “My take” is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• I initially sided with the parents who brought this challenge to the court.
• After reading more, I’m unconvinced by the court’s arguments and worry about the ruling’s implications.
• Other parents could want to protect their kids from ideas they don’t like, which would seriously disrupt education.

Yesterday, we covered the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Trump administration on universal injunctions, and I said I thought they were right on the legal argument and that the outcome would be positive.

Today, I think the Supreme Court is on very shaky legal footing — and the practical outcome is going to be very, very bad.

Let me start by saying that, when I first read about the ruling, my instinct was to agree with the Supreme Court and side with the plaintiffs. I’ve been a general subscriber to the “parental rights” movement for a long time, and I see a lot of upside to parents having a healthy level of input and control over what their kids are taught in school.

Specifically, the descriptions of the nine picture books approved by the school district make it easy to understand why religious families (and, frankly, any parents) may want to opt out. It’s reasonable to not want your second-grader to read a book like Pride Puppy, which contains a “search and find” list of words like “[drag] queen” and “king,” “leather” and “lip ring,” or be taught that people simply “guess” the gender of a newborn child, as if there is no relationship between sex and gender. Like many others, I think the LGBTQ rights movement and many progressives have consistently shot themselves in the foot by trying to normalize fringe progressive ideology in schools or by taking that ideology to court.

These parents made the basic argument that they, or anyone teaching their kids that marriage is between a man and a woman or that there are only two genders, should be able to opt their kids out of lessons that teach them otherwise. A sturdy legal precedent forbids government institutions like public schools from “coercing” students into violating their religious views, and these lessons seem to qualify.

So when the court ruled 6–3 in favor of the parents, and I initially thought, “That makes sense, I probably would have voted the same way.” I think my reaction was partially informed by the age of the children in question. Candidly, I’m not sure why any of these books whose narratives center on sexual or gender identity need to be taught until fifth or sixth grade, at the earliest, when sex education is first broached. But as I read about this specific case, I started to doubt my priors.

First of all, the material facts of the parents’ argument for how their religious rights were being violated seem almost entirely hypothetical. As Ian Millhiser wrote, the case record contains no information about “about how any teacher or school employee has actually used any of the Storybooks in the Parents’ children’s classrooms, how often the Storybooks are actually being used, what any child has been taught in conjunction with their use, or what conversations have ensued about their themes,” according to the lower court that initially ruled against the parents.

The story books were physically in this school — yes — and were being taught from. But how teachers incorporated them into their lessons (or “coerced” kids) is totally unclear. In fact, as Sotomayor explained in her dissent, the school board publicly laid out many reasonable boundaries for teaching the books, even including a section on how to respond to a student who says being gay is against their religion.

Teachers are told to reply like this: “I understand that is what you believe, but not everyone believes that. We don’t have to understand or support a person’s identity to treat them with respect and kindness. School is a place where we learn to work together regardless of our differences. In any community, we’ll always find people with beliefs different from our own and that is okay—we can still show them respect.”

Legally, does that instruction violate a parent's right to their child's free expression of religion? And morally, is that really something we are afraid to teach kids?

Furthermore, the school district had already tried the opt-out process voluntarily; it worried that kids getting up and leaving the classroom anytime certain books were being taught would be disruptive and cause social stigma or isolation for the children of LGBTQ parents — which seems like a reasonable expectation.

One of the most persuasive pieces I read about this ruling was written by Heidi Li Feldman in Slate (under “What the left is saying”). Partisan slant aside, Feldman’s legal arguments are buttoned-up; for instance, she asked us to consider how this court would view an atheist who didn’t want their child to absorb all manner of books depicting children happily celebrating religious holidays, which could make it difficult for their parents to teach them their religious outlook at home. This resonates with me — I was raised Jewish, and my childhood education in public school contained endless references to Christmas and Christmas-themed activity. Would my parents have had a right to remove me from class anytime a book happily portraying Christians was being taught? I honestly hope not.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor laid out in one of the more scathing and convincing dissents I’ve read in a while (which I will pull from heavily today), the majority vastly overstated the implications of these books being in classrooms and contorted previous free-exercise decisions to apply to this case. Here is one section from Sotoymayor’s dissent that has been widely shared:

In the majority’s eyes, reading aloud Uncle Bobby’s Wedding is just ‘like the compulsory high school education considered in Yoder.’ That assertion is remarkable. Reading a storybook that portrays a family as happy at the news of their gay son’s engagement, the majority claims, is equivalent to a law that threatened the very ‘survival of [the] Amish communit[y]’ in the United States. To read that sentence is to refute it.

On the most basic level, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment is about preventing the government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. It is about what the government cannot do to the individual, not about the government itself being subject to individual or familial preferences. There is a library of Supreme Court precedent for this view, which — again — Sotomayor’s dissent lays out. From a legal perspective, I’m far more convinced by her argument than Alito’s.

Now for this ruling’s implications, which are far worse than the legal rationale.

Again, Sotomayor lays out the potential outcomes here: “Books expressing implicit support for patriotism, women’s rights, interfaith marriage, consumption of meat, immodest dress, and countless other topics may conflict with sincerely held religious beliefs and thus trigger stringent judicial review under the majority’s test.” Crucially, the ruling says nothing about how the standard it enforces in this ruling should apply to idiosyncratic religious beliefs, which the Constitution forbids the government from treating differently from more common ones.

How are public schools supposed to navigate this new burden? How are they going to stand up to the inevitable litigation from disgruntled parents of different religious persuasions? How are classrooms supposed to function when any number of children can walk out anytime a teacher reads from a book their parents don’t want them exposed to?

On the most basic level, my biggest bias here is that I have a hard time empathizing with this kind of parenting. You are not preparing your children for the real world by insulating them from the reality that gay or trans people exist happily — the same way a gay couple wouldn’t be preparing their child for the real world by pretending religious beliefs against same-sex marriage don’t exist. We have a pluralistic, free society in America, and that’s a good thing. Young kids should not be shielded from the reality of the world, but taught to navigate it. That doesn’t mean there aren’t objectionable things in these books (there are!), but the court is overreacting by accommodating religious families in such a broad manner here.

Unfortunately, the conservative justices seem to have chosen their destination before mapping the route to get there. I don’t say that often about this court, which I think has received a lot of unwarranted criticism. But the combination of this ruling’s legal ambiguities, the incredible burden it puts on schools, and its lack of hard facts depicting infringement on the free exercise of religion all make me incredibly skeptical of it — and fearful about its broad implications.

Take the survey: What do you think of the decision’s argument and its likely outcome? Let us know!

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Your questions, answered.

Q: We hear so much about the humanitarian situation going on in Gaza, but so little about other global conflicts. I know that there’s a dire situation in Sudan, but I don’t know how bad it is or what is causing it. Can you explain what’s going on in Sudan?

— Anonymous from Syracuse, NY

Tangle: This is part two of a three-part answer to this very complicated question. After devoting yesterday’s reader question to briefly describing Sudan’s history, today we’re going to talk about the lead-up to the current Sudanese Civil War.

Part Two

Today’s Sudanese Civil War was ostensibly started to fill a power vacuum that left the government non-functional, similar to what we saw last year in Haiti. Like in Haiti, the government crisis created a lack of international support, leading to violence and armed struggle for control. The current situation started to escalate in 2011, when South Sudan seceded from Sudan.

In the decade that followed, the Sudanese put mounting pressure on Omar al-Bashir, the dictator who came to power in 1989, to step down. Domestic pressure came to a head in 2019, resulting in a military coup to depose al-Bashir. The coup was carried out jointly by the Sudanese Armed Force (SAF) — the country’s official military, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan — and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — a militia, led by Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo. Al-Bashir initially created the RSF to counter the SAF as a “coup-proof” power structure; in practice, he used the RSF as a border guard and to suppress minorities in Darfur.

The SAF leader al-Burhan led a transnational committee, which included RSF head Hemedti and other military leaders, to select an interim prime minister. In 2019, the committee chose Deputy Executive Secretary of UNECA Abdalla Hamdok; however, the SAF and RSF orchestrated another coup against Hamdok in October 2021, causing the United States, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund to pause urgently needed aid and debt relief. After briefly becoming prime minister again in November 2021, Hamdok resigned in 2022, leaving al-Burhan effectively in control of the Sudanese government.

After negotiations throughout 2022, the SAF and RSF agreed to a two-year plan to install a civilian-led government in Sudan, which immediately sparked backlash from the population. The Sudanese citizens protested the plan’s length, its lack of accountability for the military leaders, and its elevation of Hemedti to essentially al-Burhan’s equal.

Tensions rose between the SAF and RSF, resulting in an all-out war between the two groups in 2023.

Reminder: This is part two of a three-part series on this question. You can read part one here.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

The Department of Homeland Security, in collaboration with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), recently upgraded a network of federal databases to allow state and county election officials to quickly check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists. The tool was built to help election officials ensure only citizens are voting, and it is believed to be the first searchable national citizenship data system. However, some legal experts have expressed concern that the upgrades were rolled out without public notice, suggesting the government may not have followed proper procedures for collecting and using Americans' personal data. NPR has the story.

Numbers.

• 71. The number of amicus briefs filed in Mahmoud v. Taylor.
• 210. The total number of schools in the Montgomery County, Maryland school district, according to U.S. News & World Report.
• 140. The number of elementary schools in the district.
• 160,554. The total number of students in the district.
• 54% and 31%. The percentage of U.S. adults who think parents should and should not, respectively, be able to opt their children out of learning about sexual orientation and gender identity if doing so conflicts with the parents’ personal views or beliefs, according to a November 2023 Pew Research survey.
• 79%. The percentage of Republicans who think parents should be able to opt their children out of such lessons.
• 32%. The percentage of Democrats who think parents should be able to opt their children out of such lessons.

The extras.

• One year ago today we wrote about the Supreme Court overturning Chevron Doctrine.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the firefighter shooting in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
• Nothing to do with politics: Happy Zip Code Day, Bobby Bonilla Day, and Blink-182 Day to all who celebrate.
• Yesterday’s survey: 1,756 readers responded to our survey on the Supreme Court limiting universal injunctions with 45% supporting the legal arguments and likely practical outcomes. “Federal courts have always been courts of limited jurisdiction; it's about time we were reminded of that,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

On June 20, a group of people named Ryan gathered at Coors Field in Denver, Colorado, to attempt a world record: the most people of the same first name to attend a sporting event. Ryans from 31 states and Canadian provinces took part in the “COLORADO RYAN MEETUP 2025,” which included a coordinated effort to support the four Ryans on the Colorado Rockies — and one visiting Ryan on the Arizona Diamondbacks. While the attempt fell short of the 2,325 Ivans who set the world record in 2017, it still produced a bounty of laughs, gimmicks, and heartwarming stranger connections. ESPN has the story and pictures (written, edited, and photographed entirely by people named Ryan).

P.S. Tangle has approximately 2,000 readers with the (first or last) name “Ryan.”

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