Letter to the editor: Private belief cannot supersede public tolerance

Re: Lexington lawsuit tests Supreme Court’s ruling on LGBTQ+ lessons

There is a sharp disparity between the emotional heat of this issue and the simplicity of the principle that resolves it: private belief cannot supersede public tolerance. No one can require public spheres to reflect and uphold their preferred exclusionary beliefs. All that’s required to understand this and live accordingly is to look past the tip of one’s own nose and see that if everyone demanded that public spheres reflect and prioritize their particular social bias, we’d be in a perpetual state of ideological warfare.

Keep those people away from me at the Red Sox game. Don’t allow those people into the supermarket when I’m there. Put those people in their own T railcar because I don’t want my kid exposed to them. Don’t teach the irrefutable fact that there are all kinds of families in public school because I reject some forms of human diversity. Any elementary schooler not yet indoctrinated into bigotry will tell you that such reasoning is both absurd and mean.

This is the fundamental tension at play in the Lexington lawsuit: a parent seeks to impose a private belief in the form of a public restriction by forbidding their child’s exposure to empirically real, harmless forms of family life and identity. When such attempts enter the public sphere, they transform from the exercise of personal belief into an effort to curtail the equal public recognition of others.

Inclusivity cannot include exclusivity. Public institutions must operate on public principles, not private doctrines; otherwise, no one is safe from bigotry. Public spheres must be inclusive of the full range of safe and civil human diversity. The Lexington parent’s suit asks the district to take a restrictivist stance that the district is legally prohibited from taking. A public school cannot simultaneously be inclusive of all students and validate demands that some students be treated as unmentionable, illegitimate, or erasable.

Are there, or are there not, all kinds of families? Of course there are. Is it acceptable to dismiss and demean some safe and civil kinds of families because someone with a bias against them asserts a right not to be exposed to them? No. That is bigotry, and we would do well to call it what it is. A million parents may insist that public spheres reflect their bigotry, and a million courts may exhibit their own bigotry by upholding such demands. That will never change the simple logic of the matter: intolerance cannot be tolerated in spaces required to protect against bigotry.

Parents and others who seek environments in which they can live according to their own social biases are free to seek private spaces that align with those beliefs. They may not require public institutions charged with serving everyone to reflect, enforce, or subsidize those private preferences.