When a puppy gets lost at a Pride Parade, everyone comes together to ensure the young pup is reunited with his family.
That is the premise behind the book Pride Puppy!, written by Vancouver Island author Robin Stevenson and published in 2021.
The rhyming alphabet book is described as an “affirming and inclusive book that offers a joyful glimpse of a Pride parade and the vibrant community that celebrates this day each year.”
It is now at the centre of a U.S. Supreme Court case in Maryland.
At the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), Maryland’s largest school district, which serves more than 160,000 students, approved a handful of storybooks featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer characters for use in the language-arts curriculum.
Pride Puppy! was one of the books.
Andrew Woolridge, publisher of the books at Orca Book Publishers on Vancouver Island, told Global News that while books have been banned for various reasons before, what is happening lately is a “more chilling” trend.
“In terms of people choosing to target particular groups of people in the books that are being read in schools in particular,” Woolridge said.
“What we’re seeing in this is that more and more of the books we’re publishing about LGBTQ issues are being challenged and pulled off shelves and I think that even if that book is not challenged there is the danger that it’s not being purchased or put on the shelf because people are afraid.”
MCPS said in the Supreme Court filing that its goal was always for students to engage with these storybooks, just like any other book, and the books were made available for individual reading, classroom read-alouds and other educational activities.
They were not used in any lessons related to gender and sexuality.
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However, three sets of parents asked MCPS to notify them when these storybooks were read and to arrange alternate lessons for their children.
In March 2023, MCPS said it would not permit parents to opt their children out of language-arts instruction involving the storybooks due to high levels of absenteeism, so the parents sued.
“Petitioners also moved for a preliminary injunction requiring notice and opt-outs, arguing that their children’s ‘exposure’ to the storybooks ‘necessarily establishes the existence of a burden’ on their right to freely exercise their religion,” according to court documents.
“There is no circuit split on this issue. Every single court of appeals that has considered the question has held that mere exposure to controversial issues in a public-school curriculum does not burden the free religious exercise of parents or students.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has now agreed to hear whether the school district violated parents’ religious rights when it removed the option to allow their children to opt-out of any instruction involving these books.
Oral arguments are scheduled to begin on April 22.
Woolridge said this was pitched as a “parental rights versus religious freedoms” case, but he said he thinks it’s more of a case of “hate being disguised as parental rights.”
The other books involved in a case include a story about a niece meeting her uncle’s husband-to-be, a prince falling in love with a knight as they battle a dragon in a mythical kingdom, a girl feeling nervous about giving a Valentine to her crush and a transgender boy sharing his gender identity with his family.
“These are archetypal stories that touch on the same themes introduced to children in such classic books as Snow White, Cinderella, and Peter Pan,” court documents state.
Woolridge said he has spoken with Stevenson and she, along with other authors, has removed herself from social media and she and her family are getting death threats over this case.
“They are getting direct death threats, some of them, and I think that’s really problematic, especially with books like this, which are doing nobody any harm,” he added.
“They are talking about diversity and allowing people to see themselves reflected in the books that are in their schools.”
Stevenson is not giving interviews about this case.
While Woolridge said he would also prefer not to talk about these issues in the public, he said Orca Publishing is proud of the books they publish and they stand behind their authors and their chosen subject matters.
“When you see injustices, you need to stand up, whether it impacts you or not,” he said.
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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