On Thursday, a Maryland district court sent a clear message to parents at Montgomery County Public Schools: you don’t get a say in what your kids read at school.

Or more specifically, as the court concluded, a parent’s right to opt out of a public school curriculum that “conflicts with their religious views is not a fundamental right.”

The ruling was a shock to parents, the majority of them Muslim and Ethiopian Christians, who supported a federal lawsuit against the Montgomery County Board of Education earlier this summer in response to new requirements that their children—many as young as prekindergarten age—would be mandated to read (or have teachers read them) books about LGBT topics, regardless of their parents’ objections. “It’s very disrespectful,” Shaykh El Hadji Sall, the parent of three children who attend a school in the system, told me at a rally organized by parents Thursday. “It’s ignoring the will of the people.”

[The court decision here was a stunner. The opt-out was the parents’ protection for their free expression of religion as well as their authority for their children. This all but declares their children the property of the state and a target for proselytizing the secular gender-ideology cult preferred by education bureaucrats. Hopefully a higher court will reverse this decision, but it’s going to get ugly. Home schooling may be the only option for Maryland families of faith at this point. — Ed]