In preparing for a Supreme Court argument on Tuesday over the role of religion in public schools, the justices and their law clerks have considered the usual pile of briefs, pleadings, declarations and exhibits. But this time the key documents in the court record are seven colorful books for young children, with sparse text and cheerful illustrations. They include “Pride Puppy,” an alphabet primer about a family whose puppy gets lost at a Pride parade; “Love, Violet,” about a girl who develops a crush on her female classmate; “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” about a same-sex union; and “Born Ready,” about a transgender boy. Those books are at the center of the case, which asks whether parents’ rights to the free exercise of their faiths are burdened if public schools do not allow them to withdraw their children from classes on days that books with gay and transgender characters and themes are discussed. Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school system, added the books in 2022 to the curriculum for students from prekindergarten through fifth grade. The school system’s list included, its lawyers told the justices, “a handful of storybooks featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer characters for use in the language-arts curriculum, alongside the many books already in the curriculum that feature heterosexual characters in traditional gender roles.” At first, the Montgomery school system gave parents notice when the storybooks were to be discussed, along with the opportunity to have their children excused from those sessions. But the school system soon eliminated the advanced notice and opt-out policy, saying it was hard to administer, led to absenteeism and risked “exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.” Parents of several faiths sued, saying the books violated the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion. The books, their complaint said, “promote one-sided transgender ideology, encourage gender transitioning and focus excessively on romantic infatuation.” The parents said they did not seek to remove the books from school libraries and classrooms but only to shield their children from having to discuss them. (The school system has since withdrawn two of the seven books, including “Pride Puppy.” In court papers, officials said the books had been re-evaluated under standard procedures but did not elaborate.) Billy Moges, a member of Kids First, an association of parents and teachers that is a plaintiff in the case, said in an interview that the books were “teaching things that are exactly in contradiction with what we believe in.”“It steals their innocence,” she said of the impact the books have on children. “It destroys the foundation that they have, the structure of who they are, in God and in our faith. And it just makes absolutely no sense. It just defies common sense.”Ms. Moges said she has withdrawn her three young children from public schools and has sent them to a private one she helped found that would, she said, “not brainwash kids with these ideas.” Still, she said, “I want to send my kids back to Montgomery County schools because we don’t have the resources that they do.” Jodie Patterson, the author of “Born Ready,” said she was flummoxed by the controversy. “My initial reaction was, ‘My little book? How is that harming anyone?’”Her book, about a transgender boy who wins a karate tournament with the support of his family and a school principal, was well received when it was published in 2021. Kirkus Reviews said it “shines with joy and affirmation” and amounted to “a triumphant declaration of love and identity.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT On reflection, she said she felt the parents’ objections amounted to erasing the experiences of some families. “When certain religions and certain religious people say, ‘This is not appropriate for my religion,’” she said, “it’s problematic.” “Not because I don’t want to respect people’s religions,” she went on, “but because reading stories about children who are different is fundamental.” In recent cases, the Supreme Court has expanded the role of religion in public life, sometimes at the expense of other values like gay rights. The court has ruled in favor of a web designer who said she did not want to create sites for same-sex marriages, a high school football coach who said he had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games and a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia that said it could defy city rules and refuse to work with same-sex couples who had applied to take in foster children. Some legal scholars said that accepting the logic of the Maryland parents’ arguments would have broad consequences for the ability of public schools to manage their curriculums, citing cases in which parents unsuccessfully challenged course materials on evolution and the Big Bang theory and storybooks about wizards and giants. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “The First Amendment does not shield public school students from the mere exposure to ideas that conflict with their personal views, whether secular or religious,” Justin Driver of Yale Law School and Eugene Volokh of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University wrote in a brief supporting the school system. The school system does allow parents to withdraw older students from sex education classes for any reason. Lawyers for the parents said that differing treatment by the school board was telling. “The board designed a regime where there was no notice or opt-outs only for discussions involving these storybooks — an area of curriculum that it knew was laden with religious import,” their brief said. The Supreme Court has in recent years been exceptionally wary of treating religion exemptions differently from secular ones. “The Supreme Court has adopted a very expansive notion of religious inequality,” said Zalman Rothschild, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Lower courts have ruled against the parents. “There’s no evidence at present that the board’s decision not to permit opt-outs compels the parents or their children to change their religious beliefs or conduct, either at school or elsewhere,” Judge G. Steven Agee wrote for the majority of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Judge Agee, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, added that “simply hearing about other views does not necessarily exert pressure to believe or act differently than one’s religious faith requires.” In dissent, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., who was appointed by President Trump, said the parents had made a modest request. “They do not claim the use of the books is itself unconstitutional,” he wrote. “And they do not seek to ban them. Instead, they only want to opt their children out of the instruction involving such texts.” The school board, in its Supreme Court brief in the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, No. 24-297, wrote that the dispute was based on a misunderstanding about what lessons students are intended to draw from the books. “The storybooks themselves do not instruct about gender or sexuality,” the brief said. “They are not textbooks. They merely introduce students to characters who are L.G.B.T.Q. or have L.G.B.T.Q. family members, and those characters’ experiences and points of view.” The books supplement rather than replace other children’s stories like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Goldilocks, which, the brief noted, also depict families, communities and relationships.

Three people, including a 12-year-old boy, died after severe weather struck Oklahoma on Saturday as part of a sprawling storm system that was bringing damaging winds and the threat of tornadoes to the South and Midwest on Sunday. Wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour and pea-size hail swept through parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Missouri and Oklahoma on Sunday, and thunderstorms were expected across south-central Texas, posing a risk for travelers on the Easter holiday weekend, according to the National Weather Service. In towns across Missouri and Arkansas, powerful winds damaged roofs and brought down power lines. Residents in those places spent Sunday afternoon under tornado watches and warnings, which persisted into the evening. On Saturday night, one person was killed and another was injured after a tornado touched down in Spaulding, Okla., according to Hughes County Emergency Management. Two homes were destroyed, county officials said. In Moore, Okla., which is about 11 miles south of Oklahoma City, a woman and a 12-year-old boy were found dead after a vehicle they were in became stranded in floodwaters. The vehicle was swept under a bridge, the Moore Police Department said. Rescue workers responded to the stranded vehicle around 9 p.m. on Saturday and were able to rescue all but two people who were inside. The authorities first declared the two people missing, but they were later found dead, the authorities said. “This was a historical weather event that impacted roads and resulted in dozens of high-water incidents across the city,” the Police Department said. The severe storms were expected to move across Missouri through Sunday night and could produce hail the size of golf balls, winds up to 70 miles per hour and strong tornadoes, according to the Weather Service. In Arkansas, storms were possible across much of the state, especially in the north. Large hail, damaging winds and tornadoes were possible into Sunday night. Editors’ Picks How Pickle Lemonade Took Over the Group Chat Kristen Stewart Thinks the Critics at Cannes Are Being Too Nice Living the Slop Life The Weather Service warned that flooding could occur in much of Oklahoma on Sunday, and flood warnings, which mean a flood is occurring or imminent, were in place across the state. Severe thunderstorms on Saturday led to at least one tornado in Texas and heavy rains, flooding and large hail in Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. The storm system is moving at a slow pace, which may lead thunderstorms to repeatedly break out over the same regions, increasing the risk of flash flooding. Severe storms could continue in the area beyond the weekend, forecasters said. Heavy rains could lead to flash flooding through Monday morning. Precipitation levels are expected to remain above normal from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic through the end of April, according to the Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center’s outlook. This is particularly true for Northeast Texas, North Louisiana, Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma and southern Missouri.

Amid the measles outbreak that started in Texas and is now believed to have spread to four other states, many people might be wondering: do I need to get a measles vaccine booster? Measles is a highly contagious airborne disease that can lead to severe complications, including death. It’s also vaccine preventable through the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which is typically administered in childhood in two doses. More than two decades ago, measles was declared eliminated from the U.S., thanks in large part to a successful vaccination program. But in recent years, vaccination rates have declined and measles cases have soared. In 2024, there were 285 reported measles cases in the country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Four months into 2025, the agency has received reports of 800 confirmed measles cases. Of those, 96% were in people who were either unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status. Advertisement So far in 2025, two children in Texas have died of measles-related complications; both of them were unvaccinated. A third person, an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico, tested positive for measles after death, though the official cause of death is still under investigation, according to the CDC. Before this year, the last confirmed measles death in the U.S. was in 2015, according to the CDC. Read More: Why Measles Cases Are Rising Right Now Public health experts say that the best way to protect yourself against measles is to get vaccinated. The MMR vaccine is safe and effective; according to the CDC, two doses are 97% effective against measles. People who don’t get the MMR vaccine in childhood can still get it later in life, says Dr. Ravi Jhaveri, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the division head of pediatric infectious diseases at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. The CDC has said that most people who get the MMR vaccine will be protected for life, and there are no official recommendations to get a third dose of the vaccine during a measles outbreak. “The vast majority of people with two doses are protected [and] do not come down with measles,” Jhaveri says. “We have decades upon decades of experience that two doses has been safe and effective, and when we maintained two doses at a very high level across our population, we were seeing very few, if any, outbreaks.” Still, that doesn’t mean a booster is never needed for other types of diseases. According to Jhaveri, there are two important factors that help make that determination: the genetic variability of the virus and the nature of your immunity. The viruses causing the flu and COVID-19, for instance, have a lot of genetic variability, which is why public health experts recommend getting a new vaccine against those viruses every year. People also get booster shots for tetanus because antibody levels against the bacteria wane over time and if someone has a high-risk exposure—such as stepping on a rusty nail—doctors err on the side of vaccinating them afterward, Jhaveri says. But measles, he says, is more genetically stable and both doses of the MMR vaccine “allow for you to have antibody levels that are high enough to protect you and also allow your cells to respond in case you are exposed, to prevent you from getting infected.”

During his first term, Donald Trump’s administration had a chance to challenge Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s protection from deportation, but didn’t take it, according to court documents reviewed by TIME. In October 2019, an immigration judge decided Abrego Garcia shouldn’t be removed because of violent gang threats he faced if he returned to El Salvador. Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement had 30 days to appeal that ruling. No appeal was filed, according to the court documents. The little-noticed episode was a key part of the long saga of Abrego Garcia, the Salvadorian sheet metal apprentice living in Maryland who was accused of being an MS-13 gang member and mistakenly sent in March by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. And it points to the main beef the courts have with Trump over his deportation actions: Trump can deport people from the country, but when he does, he has to follow the law. Abrego Garcia was marched into CECOT prison on March 15. On Thursday, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, met with Abrego Garcia in El Salvador. Van Hollen posted a photo on X of himself sitting at a table with coffee cups and glasses of water in front of them. Abrego Garcia is dressed in a short-sleeved plaid shirt and is wearing a white Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl championship hat. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele mocked the meeting on X and wrote that Abrego Garcia won’t be released, saying “he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” Trump officials have acknowledged that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error” but have refused to correct it. The Supreme Court ruled on April 10 that the Trump administration must “facilitate” his release from prison in El Salvador and ensure his case is “handled as it would have been” if he hadn’t been improperly sent to El Salvador. But so far, the Trump administration has done nothing. Instead, the Trump administration has worked overtime to convict Abrego Garcia in the court of public opinion. On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security published a temporary restraining order that Abrego Garcia’s wife had filed against him in 2021 that said he had “punched and scratched” and “grabbed and bruised” her, and police reports detailing his alleged gang affiliation under the headline: “THE REAL STORY: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 Gang member with a History of Violence.” What the Supreme Court has demanded, though, is not proof Abrego Garcia has never done anything wrong. The court demands that the Trump administration follow the procedures laid out in the law for removing someone from the country. The U.S. District Court Judge handling Abrego Garcia’s case, Paula Xinis, has ordered officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to sit for depositions by April 23 about how his removal was handled and allowed Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to demand documents about his case. When the Trump administration tried to quash those instructions at the Fourth Circuit court of appeals, three federal judges said Trump must comply. “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order," wrote conservative circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan. Even though the Trump administration asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13, the judge wrote, "he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order.” Abrego Garcia's deportation had been prohibited in 2019 because an immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal.” When the immigration judge considered his case, Abrego Garcia was being held in immigration detention after being arrested by Prince George's County police in a Home Depot parking lot. A “gang field interview” sheet released by the Justice Department on Wednesday describes him wearing "a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears, and mouth of the presidents." Police said the clothing was "indicative of the Hispanic gang culture." The immigration judge had looked at the information alleging Abrego Garcia’s gang ties provided by the Department of Homeland Security and determined it wasn’t sufficient to prove he was a member of the gang, according to court documents. Instead, the judge gave weight to testimony from his family that a separate gang called Barrio 18 in El Salvador had threatened Abrego Garcia with death because his family would not pay the gang protection money. The judge acknowledged that Abrego Garcia’s case wasn’t a slam dunk. “This case is a close call,” Judge David M. Jones wrote in his order. At the end of the order is a line that says “each party has the right to appeal this decision” within 30 days. That decision was still on the books when Abrego Garcia was placed on a plane to El Salvador last month. The Bureau of Immigration Appeals database logs the status of immigration cases by unique identifiers called “A-Numbers,” short for Alien Registration Numbers. Abrego Garcia’s entry shows his application for “withholding of removal” was granted on Oct. 10, 2019. Below that is the message: “No appeal was received for this case.” The White House, DHS and ICE did not reply to requests for comment. John Sandweg, who was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama administration, says that ICE attorneys would usually appeal such a decision if they thought that the person was a public safety threat. “I do think that’s indicative that they didn’t have serious concerns about this guy from a public safety perspective,” Sandweg says. “Otherwise, in cases where they do, they absolutely appeal.”

Xiaofeng Wan, a former admissions officer at Amherst College, now works as a private consultant to international students who want to come to the United States. This week, as he held meetings in China with prospective students, he sensed a deep uncertainty among their parents. “They really don’t know whether they should send their children to a country where they don’t welcome Chinese students or they see China as a hostile competitor,” Dr. Wan said by telephone from Beijing. “It’s an unprecedented situation that we’ve never seen before.” For years, American colleges and universities have attracted growing numbers of international students who often pay full tuition, effectively subsidizing domestic students. But the Trump administration’s recent move to deport hundreds of students here on visas, and his trade war with China, have stoked fears that the United States is no longer a welcoming place for international students. This week, the administration also asked Harvard to hand over lists of foreign students, adding to a sense of panic on campuses. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Suzanne Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, said the chaos of visa terminations had fueled concerns among many students. “I think it sends a powerful signal to friends and family at home that the U.S. is not a safe place to be anymore,” she said. If the nation gains a reputation for being hostile to international students, it could be devastating for many American colleges and universities. There were more than 1.1 million international students in the United States during the 2023-24 academic year, according to a recent report released by the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Institute of International Education. The number includes students who remain in the country briefly after graduation to gain work experience. The report identifies New York University, Northeastern University and Columbia University as the three largest host schools for international students. At N.Y.U., their enrollment has increased nearly 250 percent over the last decade. Losing foreign students could also be bad for the broader economy, experts say. International students pumped nearly $44 billion into the American economy and generated 378,000 jobs last year alone, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, which promotes international education.Moody’s, the bond rating agency, downgraded the higher education outlook to “negative” last month, citing federal policy changes as a threat. The Trump administration has said that it is targeting international students who have broken the law or pose a threat to its foreign policy interests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has argued that “no one has a right to a visa.” In remarks last month, he said that in giving and revoking visas, “we’re going to err on the side of caution.” “We are not going to be importing activists into the United States,” he added. “They’re here to study. They’re here to go to class. They’re not here to lead activist movements that are disruptive and undermine the — our universities. I think it’s lunacy to continue to allow that.” International student enrollment had been on an upward trajectory for decades. Gaurav Khanna, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied foreign students, said the revenue they bring in helped some public universities weather the Great Recession. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Dr. Khanna’s research found schools that could attract students from abroad were often able to avoid raising in-state tuition for domestic students and major research and instructional cuts. “To keep doors open for local students, you need to let in more international students,” he said. Beyond the economic effects, leaders in higher education worry that decreases in international enrollment will deter the world’s top minds from coming to the United States. International students accounted for nearly 6 percent of the total higher education population in the United States, according to the I.I.E. report. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where more than one in four students hail from abroad, the president, Sally Kornbluth, said on Monday that the university would be “gravely diminished without the students and scholars who join us from other nations.” “The threat of unexpected visa revocations will make it less likely that top talent from around the world will come to the U.S.,” Dr. Kornbluth said in a message to campus. “That will damage American competitiveness and scientific leadership for years to come.” Chris R. Glass, a professor at Boston College who studies international enrollment, estimates that 50,000 to 75,000 international graduate students in science and technology fields could be affected by federal grant cuts. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Overall, he said the number of international students could fall below 1 million for the first time since the 2014-15 academic year. An analysis by The New York Times found that the Trump administration has canceled more than 1,500 visas at 222 schools nationwide. Immigration agents have also sought to detain and deport a number of students and researchers. Some of the visa revocations appear to be related to legal infractions in students’ pasts, a few are related to activism, and in some cases students do not know why they have lost their visas. One international student from London, Patrick, who is 22, described a huge amount of fear among his fellow students. He asked that neither his last name nor his university in New York be identified for fear of repercussions. He said that he had recently deleted all of his text messages because he was worried about surveillance when he re-entered the country. Still, he said, he plans to finish his senior year in the United States and stay for a year after graduation. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT President Trump’s first term also brought a chill to international student enrollment. In 2017, Mr. Trump banned travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries, and many colleges reported dips in foreign applicants. A larger decline occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic. “Certain universities probably can weather the storm. But other universities don’t have the resources,” Dr. Khanna said. “If they get cut off from a lot of their funding and at the same time get cut off from revenue from international students, they’re in trouble.” Many of the students arriving from outside the United States view their degrees as paths to employment in the country. But as the Trump administration seeks to crack down on immigration, some students could be deterred over the anxiety that studying in the U.S. and joining the domestic labor force no longer “guarantees you the things you thought it did,” Mr. Khanna said. It was already a particularly perilous time for American schools, who are facing a decline in students as birthrates dip. Recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics predicts that the annual number of graduating high school seniors, which peaked this year at more than 3.8 million, will decline to 3.5 million by 2032. During President Trump’s first term, some American universities tried to persuade foreign students to come in spite of concerns about a hostile administration. Now universities are scrambling to help the international students already enrolled who have been forced to leave. After the State Department canceled the visas of 40 students and recent graduates of Northeastern University in Boston, the school said that it would offer some of those students remote learning opportunities or transfers to its international campuses. Dr. Khanna said it wasn’t clear what might happen long term, this time. “There’s a question of ‘will the U.S. lose this comparative advantage?’”

On its face, the April 17 report issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was nothing short of alarming. According to a nationwide survey conducted in 2022 across 16 localities in the U.S., one in 31 children studied had been diagnosed with autism. That’s a significant increase from the one-in-36 reported in 2020, and a huge jump from the one-in-150 in 2000. “The autism epidemic is running rampant,” declared Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in a press release. “President Trump has tasked me with identifying the root causes of the childhood chronic disease epidemic—including autism. We are assembling teams of world-class scientists to focus research on the origins of the epidemic, and we expect to begin to have answers by September.” But Kennedy has it wrong, say critics—and even the CDC itself. The increases seen in various communities, says the report, “might be due to differences in availability of services for early detection and evaluation and diagnostic practices…Another reason for differences in prevalence could be whether children have insurance coverage or meet eligibility criteria for access to early intervention services.” That is in keeping with the position of experts, who have maintained for years that increases in autism cases are a mere function of better screening and a widening of the diagnostic criteria of what constitutes the condition. If you look for more autism—and, not insignificantly, have a better understanding of the signs—you’re going to find more. “Most of the rise in autism is not a true rise of autism, but an increase in diagnosis and because of changes in diagnostic criteria,” says Dr. Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, and co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital’s Center for Vaccine Development. “Also, starting in 2005, the American Academy of Pediatrics asked pediatricians to start doing autism screening at between one and two years of age. Additionally, we've provided access to autism services, so there's been incentive to get kids help.” Kennedy doesn’t agree with that explanation. “One of the things I think we need to move away from today is this ideology that this diagnosis, rather [than] the relentless increases, are simply artifacts of better diagnoses, better recognition," he said at a press conference following the release of the CDC report. “Doctors and therapists in the past weren't stupid, they weren't missing all these cases. The epidemic is real." He went on to condemn what he called “epidemic denial” on the part of the scientific community. “External factors, environmental exposures,” Kennedy said. “That's where we're going to find the answer." Among the sources of those exposures Kennedy has cited are environmental and industrial chemicals, food additives, and contaminants in the water supply. What he hasn’t mentioned much lately is the widely debunked idea that vaccines cause autism, though that is a drum he has banged repeatedly in the past. It’s that history that causes members of the autism advocacy community concern, worrying that Kennedy’s promise to begin having answers to the causes of autism by September is just a pretext to reach a predetermined conclusion. “It's become clear that the goal of the administration is to announce that they have found data proving that vaccines cause autism, but not to focus on finding the actual causes,” says Alison Singer, the founder of the Autism Science Foundation—which raises funds for autism research—and the mother of an adult daughter with what she describes as profound autism. “That question has been asked and answered. There is no link between autism and vaccines. [The risk is that] the administration announces vaccines cause autism and then declares the case closed and stops funding autism research that focuses on finding the actual causes.” Those causes begin with genetics. One 2020 study conducted by Harvard’s and MIT’s jointly run Broad Institute found 102 genes associated with an increased risk of developing autism. “I imagine that like me, the many leading companies and academic sites that are focusing on genetically guided treatments for causes of profound autism would find it disquieting that the head of HHS is unaware of the state of the field, in spite of having access to national and international leaders in the field,” says Dr. Joseph Buxbaum, Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Genetics and Genomic Sciences at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. That’s not to say genes are entirely dispositive; having genes associated with the condition does not mean a child will inevitably develop it. Other factors can come into play. According to one 2022 study, exposure to chemicals such as pesticides and phthalates, as well as air pollution, may awaken sleeping autism genes, as can nutritional deficiencies. That is at least partly in keeping with Kennedy’s charge that environmental toxins play a role. Parental age may also be involved, with older mothers and fathers more likely to have an autistic child than younger parents. Hotez cites at least one medication—depakote, an anti-seizure drug—that may also have an autism link if taken by a mother when she is pregnant. Kennedy, Hotez says, made a “false statement” in claiming that the scientific community denies that there are any environmental factors at play. “I’ve said to RFK Jr. that there could be an environmental component, but not vaccines, because autism occurs in fetal brain development well before kids ever see vaccines.” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, also believes that Kennedy’s stated goal to begin determining the roots of autism—a condition that has yielded its secrets only slowly over decades of research—by September is nonsense. Offit points to other claims Kennedy has made as illustrative of what he sees as a fast and loose relationship with scientific fact. “Where's the evidence, for example, that taking fluoride out of the drinking water is beneficial? Because the CDC lists that as one of its top 10 public health achievements,” says Offit. “Where's the evidence that says that not eating ultra processed foods makes you healthier? It certainly sounds right. I’d just like to see the data.” The Brookings Institute and others point to a 2021 statement Kennedy made in which he said Black people should be put on a different vaccination schedule from that of whites because their immune systems respond differently. During Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat from Maryland, called him out on this position. Kennedy stuck by it. All of this raises critics’ doubts that Kennedy could be anything like a fair and knowledgeable arbiter of the roots of autism—much less that an HHS under his direction could determine those roots in the next five months. “When he comes out and says we're going to find the cause of autism by September, it’s naive. It's almost childlike, because it's like saying we're going to know the cause of cancer by September,” says Hotez. “Everyone knows there are multiple different forms of cancer, there are multiple different forms of autism, multiple different forms of cancer genes, multiple different forms of autism genes. People like myself have spent hours trying to tutor him on all this, and he just doesn’t listen.”

Sorry to overwhelm you, but there are lots of different types of apologies. Some are heartfelt; others are inflammatory. Some are just meaningless uses of the word “sorry”—a language habit we should all try to fix so that true apologies carry more weight. “Understanding these different types of apologies helps us become more discerning about the messages we receive, and more intentional about the ones we send,” says Audra Nuru, a professor of communication studies and family studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. “It hopefully helps us foster more authentic and meaningful communication in our lives.”

On its face, the April 17 report issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was nothing short of alarming. According to a nationwide survey conducted in 2022 across 16 localities in the U.S., one in 31 children studied had been diagnosed with autism. That’s a significant increase from the one-in-36 reported in 2020, and a huge jump from the one-in-150 in 2000. “The autism epidemic is running rampant,” declared Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in a press release. “President Trump has tasked me with identifying the root causes of the childhood chronic disease epidemic—including autism. We are assembling teams of world-class scientists to focus research on the origins of the epidemic, and we expect to begin to have answers by September.” Advertisement But Kennedy has it wrong, say critics—and even the CDC itself. The increases seen in various communities, says the report, “might be due to differences in availability of services for early detection and evaluation and diagnostic practices…Another reason for differences in prevalence could be whether children have insurance coverage or meet eligibility criteria for access to early intervention services.” That is in keeping with the position of experts, who have maintained for years that increases in autism cases are a mere function of better screening and a widening of the diagnostic criteria of what constitutes the condition. If you look for more autism—and, not insignificantly, have a better understanding of the signs—you’re going to find more. “Most of the rise in autism is not a true rise of autism, but an increase in diagnosis and because of changes in diagnostic criteria,” says Dr. Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, and co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital’s Center for Vaccine Development. “Also, starting in 2005, the American Academy of Pediatrics asked pediatricians to start doing autism screening at between one and two years of age. Additionally, we've provided access to autism services, so there's been incentive to get kids help.”

On Tuesday the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments over whether public elementary schools violate parents’ religious rights by compelling their children to be present in class when storybooks with L.G.B.T.Q. characters are read or discussed. The hearing in the case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, comes after an era of furious protest and counterprotest, fiery school board meetings and mutual accusations of bigotry in our schools in Montgomery County, Md. The case is freighted with important questions about religious freedom, L.G.B.T.Q. and parental rights and the role of public schools. Still, as a parent in the school system now under examination, I deeply resent the whole mess. I begrudge the public money wasted on expensive lawyers. I can’t fathom that we squandered so much energy fighting over storybooks even as our kids’ test scores foundered, absenteeism soared and student mental health slumped in the wake of the pandemic. I can’t decide which conceit is more delusional: The school district grandstanding about social tolerance while forcing a minority of religious families to engage with books they consider immoral or the religious parents claiming that they can’t properly rear their children in faith if the kids get exposed to a few picture books. Both positions, it seems to me, rest on a cartoonishly inflated sense of school’s influence on children. And both seek an ideologically purified classroom while underestimating the sweep of ideas and information kids absorb simply by existing in our world. Most of all, I feel that our community’s failure to resolve a thoroughly predictable tension with the time-tested tools of straight talk, compromise and extending one another a little grace has made for a demoralizing spectacle. And I can’t help but notice that our district, in its clumsy efforts to force tolerance, might have given the Supreme Court an opening to repress L.G.B.T.Q.-related speech in the nation’s schools. There wasn’t much fanfare or outcry when, just as a school year began in 2022, the district added a handful of L.G.B.T.Q.-inclusive storybooks to the elementary English curriculum. For example, “Pride Puppy!,” an alphabet book in which a pet dog gets lost at a Pride celebration, includes a search-and-find list for incipient readers with words like “leather,” “[drag] queen” and “intersex.” In the fairy tale “Prince & Knight,” a handsome prince rejects a parade of princesses before realizing that he would rather marry a knight. “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope” was written by the mother of a trans boy. Many of us were oblivious to the whole thing and — in my case, anyway — wouldn’t have complained about the books even if we’d known. Some parents who paid closer attention could and did opt out, but that didn’t draw much attention, either. That’s probably because there is nothing very remarkable about the subtle but widespread use of opting out in American schooling. Our district (in accordance with state law, like most in the United States) has long allowed parents to opt their children out of health classes about sex and what the county calls “family life.” Even the most liberal U.S. enclaves (San Francisco; Portland, Ore.; Boston; Minneapolis) let parents excuse their kids from sex education. Giving parents the chance to opt out has, in fact, prevailed as the more open-minded approach; some states (Utah, Nevada, North Carolina) require parents to opt kids in before they are taught about sex. Editors’ Picks His Life Savings Were Mailed to Him by Paper Check. Now, It’s Gone. Timothée Chalamet Is Living a Knicks Fan’s Dream It’s Time to Put Away Your Winter Clothes. Here’s How to Store Them Safely. But a few months after introducing the books at the county’s elementary schools, the district announced, for reasons that remain unclear, that families would no longer be allowed to opt out when the books were taught. In its legal filings, the district explained that there were simply too many parents trying to opt out, causing complicated logistics, driving absenteeism, and creating a risk of “exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.”Hisham Garti, who met with district officials as a Muslim community representative, said he was told that the decision to end opt-outs came about after L.G.B.T.Q. families reported that their children’s feelings were hurt when their classmates left the room to avoid the books. He told me that he was sympathetic to the students but that religious pupils had also suffered stigma. Some of them, he said, were shamed over their families’ request to opt out. Whatever the reason, once the opt-out was gone, everything heated up. A diverse group of parents — including Muslims, Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, Jews and Catholics — demanded the opt-out’s restoration. They railed at school board meetings. They held street protests. Their numbers grew. Meanwhile, the district refused to budge. “It was extremely poorly handled by one of the biggest school districts in the U.S.,” Mr. Garti told me recently. “They allowed it to be politicized. I feel like, in the end, they knew they were wrong. But they wouldn’t back down.”It didn’t have to go this way. The district could have added the books, maintained the right to opt kids out and gotten on with running our many schools. In that alternative universe, most of the students get to hear the stories, religious parents are mollified, and the Supreme Court doesn’t have yet another case that could make life worse for L.G.B.T.Q. families across the land. Because make no mistake: Opting out is the real sticking point. There is a persistent misapprehension that this case is about book banning. But these parents haven’t sought to ban the books or tried to stop teachers from reading them aloud. They have fought energetically for the right to exempt their own kids from the instruction. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT I first heard about the books in the spring of 2023, when a mother I knew through kids’ sports asked if I was also bothered. (I wasn’t.) She wasn’t thrilled about the books, she said, but mostly she didn’t like the way they’d been brought into the classroom. The school was inserting itself between her and her children, she said, and imposing a view. She was not religious. But after fleeing Iran with her family as a child, she retained a revulsion at anything that reminded her of the ways power worked in Iran. I remember listening to her, not quite getting it, unable to follow the line between the events she described and her reactions to them. It strikes me that many of the protesters are immigrants with similar feelings — an indignation at the suggestion of their rights being infringed by the very country that was supposed to be their escape from repression. Peel away the Trump-tinged distractions of Moms for Liberty (which joined in the protests) and supporting briefs from the political organizations of Mike Pence and Stephen Miller, and there remains a substantial group of local families who believe their rights were violated. “The opt-out option was a fair approach,” a father named Wael Elkoshairi told the board during a contentious 2023 meeting. “Listen, I realize that my religion and my beliefs are not mainstream and that we’re a minority in this country. However, I stand by my God-given right and constitutional right to practice, promote and raise my children on those beliefs.” The opt-out is the kind of accommodation that keeps our public schools thrumming along, a social force at once ephemeral and fundamental. Montgomery County sprawls from crowded urban enclaves pressed against the northern edge of Washington, D.C., to sleepy farmlands out toward the Pennsylvania border, with a whole lot of suburbia in between. With about 160,000 students, the district is among the nation’s largest. It’s also one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse. My family moved to these suburbs specifically because we wanted to enroll our kids here, lured by the promise of Chinese immersion in the public schools. The longer we’ve lived here, the more I’ve noticed how the area’s cosmopolitan bonhomie is facilitated by small, easily overlooked accommodations woven carefully through the system. Religious holidays, for example, are not listed on our secular-by-decree school calendar. Still, the district carefully avoids holding classes on Rosh Hashana, Eid al-Adha or Eid al-Fitr by scheduling teacher workdays or some such. I’ve listened to hours of public testimony at school board meetings. Over and over, I heard pleas for mutual respect: We get why these books matter, and we want to support the L.G.B.T.Q. community, many of the parents said, but we’d also like to be respected and accommodated. Keep the books; read the books; just send our kids out of the class. The district did not answer questions I sent it for this article. (In October it was reported that two of the controversial books had been removed from the curriculum, but the decision was not publicly explained.) In a brief filed in the case, the school board argued that the district had no legal obligation to offer an opt-out, because the storybooks were part of the English curriculum, not health. That’s technically true: The Maryland law specifies that the opt-out is for sex education in health classes. The district also argued in court that the books told “archetypal stories that touch on the same themes introduced to children in such classic books as ‘Snow White,’ ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Peter Pan.’” The characters happened to be L.G.B.T.Q., the argument went, but their sexuality and gender identity were not the point of the book. School board members have also made this argument. I don’t believe it’s true — and I say that as someone who’d like to keep the books around. Some of the books in question are stories specifically about the revelation of gender identity or sexual orientation. It’s disingenuous to pretend that a roomful of very young readers won’t end up grappling with the very topics of sexuality that parents can opt out of in health class. The elementary school principals didn’t buy it, either. After reviewing the books, the association of unionized principals sent an alarmed letter to top Montgomery County Public School district officials. It reminded them that the county had described the books as promoting inclusivity by showcasing L.G.B.T.Q. characters. “It has been communicated that M.C.P.S. is not teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity as stand-alone concepts in elementary school,” the letter said. “However, several of the books and supporting documents seem to contradict this message.” The principals warned that the books might not be appropriate for primary school, that the teachers didn’t have proper training to present them and that some parents were concerned about hidden agendas and indoctrination. The letter noted that principals were facing parents who “vehemently” wanted the books kept from their children, as well as parent groups with “strong support” for the books. In short, decisions about the books could “significantly damage school-community relationships.” Nevertheless, after listening to a student tell the school board the topics were “unsettling” because they contradicted her religious beliefs, a board member, Lynne Harris, told a reporter she felt “kind of sorry” for the girl and speculated that she may be “parroting dogma.” Other times Ms. Harris, who was not re-elected last fall, accused the parents of “hate” and ascribed to them “a judgmental view and a belief that not everybody is OK.” (Ms. Harris didn’t reply when I emailed her for comment.) Another politician who angered the religious parents was a County Council member, Kristin Mink, who said the picture book controversy had put “some Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots.” Ms. Mink’s words echoed among the outraged parents, were documented in their legal filings and were invoked as a reminder of nasty smears. It’s too bad, though, because her full statement had a nuance that was lost when it was trimmed to the line about bigots and racists. She started by saying she’d been having good conversations with the protesting parents. “It’s more complicated than, I think, than a lot of people would like to — than a lot of people would like to think it is,” Ms. Mink said, faltering. She allowed that the parents — “not all, of course, but some” — had taken the side of the bigots. “However,” she added quickly, “the folks I talked to today, I would not put them in the same category as those folks.” She said that many of the protesting parents sincerely wanted the books to remain in the schools and that they wished “to not do harm to members of the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community.” Ms. Mink then articulated what is, I think, the county’s cleanest, strongest defense of the books: L.G.B.T.Q. people exist. “M.C.P.S. has the responsibility to include and reflect that reality in our curriculum the same way we have a responsibility to teach about evolution,” Ms. Mink said. “There are religions that don’t believe in evolution, and we don’t allow them to opt out of those portions of our science curriculum.” This is where I, too, feel cold toward the parents’ complaints. Texas educators have pushed to conceal the historical truths about slavery in children’s history texts, proposing to call the slave trade “involuntary relocation.” (In 2015 a Texas textbook was revealed to have referred to slaves as “workers.”) I’ve wondered how different these revisionists are from the Montgomery County parents demanding their primary school children be shielded from stories about gay couples and trans kids. Both, at heart, demand the schools filter out objective truths. After all, gay and trans kids, families and teachers don’t just exist; they exist within the halls of the schools. Why shouldn’t they appear in the books? The only available answer is that — for whatever religious reason or instinctive impulse — society has walled off questions of sex and sexuality and left them, largely, in the hands of parents. But there’s another way to think about the ineffaceable existence of L.G.B.T.Q. people: It underscores the futility of this entire debate over opting out. Because here’s the secret about opting out: It doesn’t really matter. As a kid in Connecticut during the tail end of the AIDS epidemic, I was opted out of AIDS education. My parents were observant Catholics who taught their children about sex but also told us to wait until we were married. My mother phoned the school and announced that she didn’t want her daughter to participate in AIDS prevention classes. The school agreed, and I was herded elsewhere while everyone else, presumably, learned about condoms. My mother did not have a good case, given the severity of the public health crisis. But the school accommodated her, and it didn’t matter. I already knew about condoms. I already had the knowledge my mother was trying to stave off. I knew because the world existed around me, unfiltered by adults. I had countless sources of information, almost all of which I (being a teenager) considered more reliable than my parents or teachers. The internet wasn’t even a part of our lives yet, but I had friends, I dated boys, and I spent time at the homes of kids whose parents were far more libertine than mine. I watched TV, I saw billboards, I read books that were packed with sex, I heard conversations, and I thumbed with interest through the Playboys one friend kept stuffed under his bed. My mother had a preference. The school accommodated her. In the words Mel Robbins has launched into our self-help zeitgeist, the school let her. Here in Montgomery County, everyone went to war, and nobody has moved on. Either the school district or the religious parents will prevail at the Supreme Court. And one group of families — either the pious or the L.G.B.T.Q. — will feel the judgment as a disenfranchisement and a sign that people like them are not wanted at school. And that’s a shame because, agree with them or not, they all stood up for their values. Whatever the justices think, it’s already too late for our community to win.

The sentence, dull but clear, was buried 158 pages into Wisconsin’s budget. “For the limit for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year,” the sentence read when it was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, “add $325” to the amount school districts could generate through property taxes for each student. But by the time Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and his veto pen were finished, it said something else entirely: “For the limit for 2023-2425, add $325.” It was clever. Creative. Perhaps even a bit subversive, extending the increase four centuries longer than lawmakers intended. But was it legal? On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court said yes. In a 4-to-3 ruling in a lawsuit challenging Mr. Evers’s use of his partial veto authority, the court’s liberal majority said the governor had acted legally. The three conservative justices on the court dissented. “We uphold the 2023 partial vetoes, and in doing so we are acutely aware that a 400-year modification is both significant and attention-grabbing,” Justice Jill J. Karofsky wrote in the majority opinion. “However, our Constitution does not limit the governor’s partial veto power based on how much or how little the partial vetoes change policy, even when that change is considerable.”Wisconsin has a long, bipartisan history of inventive vetoing that has led to intermittent outrage from whichever party does not hold the governorship. Though many states give their governor the right to veto parts of bills, Wisconsin governors have long wielded a distinctly expansive veto authority in which they can cross out words or numbers, sometimes changing the meaning of a bill. That authority has been reined in over the decades, but not eliminated. After Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican, deployed the so-called “Vanna White veto” to nix individual letters in the 1980s, voters amended the Wisconsin Constitution to say a governor could not make new words in an appropriation bill by simply erasing letters. But that amendment did not explicitly ban crossing out individual numbers, an opening (or, some say, a loophole) that Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, used to change “December 31, 2018” to “December 3018” in a law involving school districts and energy efficiency projects.That episode, which became known in Madison as the “Thousand-Year Veto,” was also challenged in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In that case, the court found that the lawsuit had not been brought in a timely manner and allowed the veto to stand. In the case decided on Friday, the court’s conservative justices described a “fantastical state of affairs” in which a governor “takes the collection of letters, numbers and punctuation marks he receives from the Legislature, crosses out whatever he pleases, and — presto! — out comes a new law never considered or passed by the Legislature at all.” “One might scoff at the silliness of it all, but this is no laughing matter,” Justice Brian Hagedorn added in that dissent. “The decision today cannot be justified under any reasonable reading of the Wisconsin Constitution.” Mr. Evers’s four-century veto was challenged by Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, a business group, on behalf of two Wisconsin residents who argued that the governor had exceeded his constitutional authority when he nixed numbers to extend the school funding limit. In oral arguments last year, Scott Rosenow, a lawyer for those residents, told the justices that “this 400-year veto approaches the absurd, and this partial veto power is corrosive to democracy.” But lawyers for Mr. Evers insisted that the veto, even if unusual, was well within his authority under Wisconsin law. Numbers, they argued, were not letters, and thus could be deleted individually under the Wisconsin Constitution. “I can understand the initial skepticism that one may have upon seeing the veto that was exercised here,” Colin Roth, an assistant attorney general, told the justices when he presented Mr. Evers’s case. But he argued that “the governor here very reasonably relied on the case law.” “Perhaps if this law had been drafted differently,” Mr. Roth said, “the governor could not have achieved this result, so the Legislature has tools when drafting.” In a statement on Friday, Mr. Evers said the court’s “decision is great news for Wisconsin’s kids and our public schools, who deserve sustainable, dependable and spendable state support and investment.” “I exercised the same line-item veto authority that has been used by decades’ worth of Wisconsin governors,” the governor said. Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, criticized the ruling as “a tortured reading of our Constitution that will hurt Wisconsin taxpayers for hundreds of years to come.” “Is any Wisconsin citizen surprised that the liberals on the Wisconsin Supreme Court are now a rubber stamp for liberal ally Tony Evers?” Mr. Vos said in a statement. The case put the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the middle of another battle over partisanship and power in the closely divided state. The court, which flipped from conservative to liberal control in 2023, has heard pivotal cases in recent years over election results, redistricting and abortion. Earlier this month, a liberal judge, Susan Crawford, was elected to the court over a conservative jurist supported by President Trump and Elon Musk. Her victory preserved a narrow liberal majority on the court just months after Mr. Trump carried Wisconsin. The election was the most expensive judicial race in American history.