On February 6th, RFI President David Trimble spoke on a panel at the Religious Freedom in America Conference. An initiative launched by the National Council for Religious Freedom, this event brought together a broad coalition of America’s faith leaders committed to defending all Americans’ constitutionally protected right to practice their faith freely. Speakers addressed today’s challenges to religious freedom and proposed solutions. Trimble’s remarks focused on threats to religious freedom in American education.

Trimble began with the issue of radical gender ideology in education and how it continues to threaten parental rights, especially when imposed through curriculum requirements for classes with young children. He highlighted the case of Montgomery County, Maryland, now before the U.S. Supreme Court, in which the school district introduced storybooks into its language arts program intended to teach children that people can change their sex and that sexual relationships between people of the same sex are morally acceptable. Maryland state law permits parents to exempt their children from sex education instruction in health class, but the district has argued that this right to “opt out” does not apply to instruction involving these storybooks because they are part of the language arts curriculum. RFI has actively supported Muslim and Christian parents in Montgomery County who have fought against this harmful policy because it impedes their freedom to direct the upbringing of their children in accord with their faith and moral convictions. We have also filed a series of amicus briefs in this case, the latest of which is here.

Trimble then turned to the case of Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, in which a the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City was blocked from opening a religious charter school to serve rural areas and underserved communities. RFI has also filed briefs in this case. To conclude his comments, Trimble recounted the post-October 7, 2023 explosion of anti-Semitism on elite college campuses across America (which he previously wrote about here and here). In this context, he underscored the need to build coalitions across religious student groups on college campuses, which is the aim of RFI’s Campus Faith Alliance.