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In the era of Don’t Say Gay laws, we mostly hear about Christian book-burners – like the eleven (yes, eleven) people who are responsible for a majority of all book challenges in the entire country.

However, whenever minority religions gain power, they’ve proven to be just as eager to engage in censorship.

Case in point: Last year, a group of Somali Muslim families in St. Louis Park, Minneapolis complained to the public school about their use of books that featured LGBTQ characters. They didn’t want their kids exposed to anything their religion treats as a sin.

Under Minnesota state law, families have a right to review school materials and make arrangements for alternative instruction if they object. So, the district had no choice but to grant their request:

Hodan Hassan, who has lived in St. Louis Park for 14 years and has four children in the district, said that she was glad when the district granted her request to allow her children to opt out of books with LGBTQ+ characters last week.

“We came to America for religious freedom in the Constitution, and so our kids will have a great opportunity,” Hodan said in an interview. “By granting us and other families the opportunity to opt out of teaching that violates our deeply held religious beliefs, families are able to raise their children according to the principle that they value the most.”

To be perfectly clear, these parents didn’t just want their kids kept out of sex ed classes that discuss alternative ideas of gender or sexuality. They wanted their kids kept out of any classroom lesson or discussion that mentions LGBTQ people in any way. They want to custom-tailor the entire public school curriculum to erase everything they disapprove of.

As a school board member noted, the law as currently written allows for parents to opt their kids out for any reason. It gives unchecked power to naked bigotry:

“The way this law currently reads means that someone can opt out of anything for any reason,” said board member Anne Casey. “If protected classes aren’t excluded, someone could come in and say, I don’t want my child to learn about people of color. I don’t want my child to learn about Jewish people. I don’t want my child to learn about people with disabilities. Those are literally all legal under the current iteration of this law, and that does not sit well with me.”

What these Muslim families obviously haven’t considered is that censorious Christian parents could just as easily use this rule against them, to exclude any positive or neutral mention of Islam from schools.

That very thing happened in Williamson County, Tennessee in 2015:

In seventh grade, kids study world geography and history, including a unit on “the Islamic world” up to the year 1500 A.D. “Williamson County parents and taxpayers have expressed concerns that some social-studies textbooks and supplemental materials in use in Tennessee classrooms contain a pro-Islamic/anti-Judeo-Christian bias,” one school-board member, Beth Burgos, wrote in a resolution. She questioned whether it’s right to test students on the tenets of Islam, along with the state and district’s learning standards related to religion. She also said the textbook should mention concepts like jihad and not portray Islam as a fundamentally peaceful religion.

In the U.K., where religion classes are part of the curriculum, there’s a chronic problem of parents who pull their kids out of lessons on Islam for similar reasons:

But a recent survey from the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education shows there appears to be a growing problem with parents taking their children out of school RE lessons. The findings show that parents are withdrawing children from lessons on Islam, or visits to the Mosque, calling into question their preparation for life in modern Britain.

Recently published research suggests that “withdrawal” has been requested in almost three quarters of schools. More than 10% of those withdrawing are open about the fact that they are doing so for racist or Islamophobic reasons.

The parents who want to yank their kids out of lessons on Islam are trying to protect their own carefully tended bigotry. They know, at some level, that better understanding promotes empathy, and they don’t want their kids to learn anything that would humanize Muslims.

When kids are kept ignorant of Islam – or any other belief system – it’s easier to portray its adherents as subhuman, backwards or violent. Muslim families have every right to object when Christians use that tactic against them. Therefore, it’s fiercely ironic that Muslim parents are using the same tactic to serve their own ends.

If Muslim parents wouldn’t want Christians to dictate what the curriculum says about Islam, those same parents should understand why they shouldn’t try to dictate what the curriculum says about gay, transgender, queer and nonbinary people.

There are people of every religion who want public schools to reflect their values and their sensibilities, and exclude every idea they disagree with. Trying to appease them all would be an impossible juggling act. There’s no way a school can accommodate the conflicting, incompatible demands of every faith in the world.

What we need is neutrality – or in other words, secularism – where schools present a diversity of viewpoints without endorsing any of them. Under the principle of secularism, parents have the right to expect that public schools not endorse a religious viewpoint the parents don’t agree with. What parents don’t have the right to do is demand that schools not mention any fact that they’d prefer to keep their children ignorant of. Creationist parents can’t demand that evolution be removed from science classes because it offends their beliefs, and Christian nationalist parents can’t expect that history classes make no mention of church-state separation in the Constitution because they object to it.

The same principle applies here. Like it or not, LGBTQ people exist. They vote, pay taxes, buy houses, settle down, fall in love, get married, and raise families. That’s a reality which no homophobic religious believer can wipe away. It’s appropriate for schools to teach about their existence as part of the bigger mission of educating kids about the world we live in.

There’s no right to enforce ignorance on children or anyone else for religious reasons. What’s more, it shows that these parents think their beliefs can’t withstand a challenge. Why else would they be anxious to censor the competition? Apparently, they’re afraid that if their kids find out that there are other ways to live, they’ll immediately abandon the faith they were raised in.

They can’t be confident in either the truth or the value of their religion, if they fear that young people will rush out the door as soon as they know they have a choice. As Daniel Dennett has said, if your faith is so fragile that it can’t survive learning about the existence of people who are different, then your faith deserves to go extinct.