Tangle - Parents can now opt kids out of LGBTQ classroom material.

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

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.Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠, our “Under the Radar” story ⁠here and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.Take the survey: What do you think of the decision’s argument and its likely outcome? Let us know!Disagree? That's okay. My opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by: Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you when you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The Pre-Roll. Shop the Summer Pre-Roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers.

["Tangle"] From executive producer, Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. ["Tangle"] Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about Mahmoud v. Taylor, another Supreme Court ruling

that has generated a lot of conversation and attention. This is the case about a group of Maryland parents who want to opt their children out of instruction that included LGBTQ themes and succeeded in doing so via the Supreme Court. So we're gonna talk about exactly what happened, and then I'm gonna share some opinions from the left and the right.

And then my take, and this is an interesting one for me because I went in with some priors and my view has changed after learning more, reading the opinion, reading the dissent, reading much of the commentary and analysis. So yeah, just an interesting take today because my priors kind of flipped after I learned more. Before we jump in to the main story though,

I wanna give you a quick reminder and heads up that tomorrow we're gonna live stream at 8 p.m. on YouTube, probably some other platforms like Instagram as well, an interview sit down between me and Camille Foster, our new editor at large. We're gonna be discussing his piece on the 2020 racial reckoning. We want to involve readers and listeners in this conversation. So if you have a question for Camille about his piece, you can submit it

with the form that is in the episode description today or in our newsletter. And then we'll try and address it in our conversation. But keep an ear out, keep an eye out for tomorrow 8 p.m. Eastern. We'll send one email reminder right before we go live. Go subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven't done that yet. We're going to try and do more stuff like this, just some community oriented streams and video calls and follow-ups on the stuff that we're covering in a way that creates some kind of accountability and conversation between us and our listeners and readers. So I'm really excited about this one. And if you haven't read Camille's piece,

be sure to go do that. Or if you haven't listened to it, be sure to find it in our podcast feed. It's very much worth your time. And with that, I'm going to send it over to John for today's main story and I'll be back for my take. Thanks Isaac and welcome everybody. Here are your quick hits for today. First up Senate debate and voting on the one big beautiful bill continued overnight and into Tuesday morning. A final vote is expected imminently. Number two, 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. Number three, 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-Senator J.D. Vance and former Representative Steve Shabbit, who argue that the law violates the First

Amendment. 4. The Boulder County District Attorney's Office announced that Karen Diamond, 82, had passed away from her injuries suffered in the flamethrower attack against members of a Jewish community group in June. And number five, President Donald Trump signed an executive order removing most U.S. sanctions on Syria, which had been in place since the 1970s. The Supreme Court signs with parents who sued on behalf of religious rights. Justices are siding with a group of Maryland parents saying they may pull their children

from public school lessons that use storybooks with LGBTQ characters or topics. The parents argue they have religious objections to the content. The decision isn't final. they say in the case. The high court just reversed the lower court rulings. But they suggest the parents will win out in the end. On Friday, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 in favor of a group of Maryland parents who had wanted to opt their elementary age children out of instruction that included LGBTQ plus 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. For context, 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 plus 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 court's 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. Rating 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 invented 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 rights of parents to guide the religious development of their children. Today, we'll break down arguments from the right and the left on the decision, and then Isaac's tape. We'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what

you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your a little too flimsy, or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you when you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect – the pre-roll.

Shop the Summer Pre-Roll and Infuse Pre-Roll Sale today at OCS.ca and participating retailers. Alright, first up, let's start with 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. Mahmood vs. 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 vs. 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 editor 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 court 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,"

Chipping in 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, Chipping and Davidson said.

As Alito pointed out, these materials are unmistakably normative, designed to promote certain values and beliefs and 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. son, 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 Troxell 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 it 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 who 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. Alright, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to 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 Lee Feldman said that the ruling means some Americans have a constitutional right to insist on theocracy. With its decision in Mahmood vs. 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 anti-democratic 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 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 Sixth Justice Mahmood 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 Milhiser argued, the Supreme Court just imposed a don't-say-gay regime on every public school in America. The Mammoud 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," Milheiser 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 Mamoud opinion, the Constitution also forbids 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 classrooms altogether, Milhajer said. The Supreme Court, in other words, has decided that in order to accommodate one identity

group – religious conservatives – schools should be hyper-cautious about teaching books that feature members of another identity group, LGBTQ plus people. In The Atlantic, Duncan Hosey 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," Josey said. Mahmoud vs. 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 Sershi Arari, would have shown prudence, not capitulation, Hosey 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. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. So yesterday, we covered the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Trump administration on universal injunctions. And I said that 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 places like school. Specifically, the descriptions of the nine picture books involved in the case 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, 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, 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 seemed to qualify. So when the court ruled 6-3 in favor of the parents, 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 Milheiser wrote, the case record contains no information 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. That's according to a lower court that initially ruled against the parents. The storybooks were physically in the school, yes, and they were being taught from. But how teachers incorporated them into their lessons or, quote-unquote, 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, quote, 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 our kids?

Furthermore, the school district had already tried the opt-out process voluntarily. It had 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 Lee 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 outlooks at home. This resonates for 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 long 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 Sotomayor's dissent that has been widely shared. She said, quote, 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 community 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. She said, quote, books expressing implicit support for patriotism, women's rights, interfaith marriage, consumption of meat, a modest dress, and countless other topics may conflict with sincerely held religious beliefs and thus trigger stringent judicial review under the majority's test, end quote. Crucially, the ruling says nothing about how the standard enforced in this ruling should apply to idiosyncratic

religious beliefs, which the Constitution forbids the government from treating differently than 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 any time 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 this reality but taught to navigate it. 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 this rulings combination of the 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. about its broad implications. We'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently

than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. dollars. All right.

That is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. Again, a reminder that we are doing a three part answer to a question we got from an anonymous reader in Syracuse. That reader said, 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? So yesterday, we devoted our answer to this question to briefly describing Sudan's history.

And today we're going to talk about the lead up to the current Sudanese civil war. So this is part two of our three part answer to this reader question. 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, the country's official military led by General Abdel Fattah al-Buran, and the Rapid Support Forces, a militia led by Mohammed Hamdan Hemedi de Gallo. 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-Buran, led a transactional committee,

which included RSF head Hamadi and other military leaders to select an interim prime minister. In 2019, the committee chose deputy executive secretary of the UNECA, Abdallah 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 2021, Hamdok resigned in 2022, leaving Al-Boran 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 Hennadide to essentially Albaran's equal. Tensions rose between the SAF and RSF resulting in an all-out war between the two groups in 2023 which is what we are living through right now. All right that is it for part two of our three-part reader question which has been a fun thing to tackle this week. Apologies also if I've butchered any of those names. I practice them. So I'm hoping I haven't done any injustice here. But Sudanese names are really tough for my English speaking self. And I think I think I'm doing okay. I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the pod and I'll see you guys

tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. Thanks, Isaac. Here's your Under the Radar story for today, folks. The Department of Homeland Security, in collaboration with the Department of Government Efficiency, 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 have not followed proper procedures for collecting and using Americans' personal data. NPR has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. personal data. NPR has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. Alright next up is our numbers section. The number of amicus briefs filed in Mahmood vs Taylor is 71. The total number of schools in the Montgomery County, Maryland School District is 210 according to US News and World Report. The number of elementary schools in the district is 140. The total number of students in the district is 160,554. The percentage of US adults who think parents should be able to opt their children out of learning about sexual orientation and gender identity if doing so conflicts with the parent's personal views or beliefs is 54%,

according to a November 2023 Pew Research survey. The percentage of U.S. adults who think parents should not be able to opt their children out of learning about sexual orientation and gender identity if doing so conflicts with the parent's personal views or beliefs is 31%. The percentage of Republicans who think parents should be able to opt their children out of such lessons is 79 percent. And the percentage of Democrats who think parents should be able to opt their children out of such lessons is 32 percent.

And last but not least, our Have a Nice Day story. On June 20th, 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. Ryan's 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, and we have a link in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, please go to readtangle.com where you can

sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundle membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will K. Back and associate editors Hunter Tasperson, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lucy Knuth, and Kendall White.

Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle.com. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose, maybe it's a little too flimsy, or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect, the pre-roll.

Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers.