An elementary school teacher in Nashville, Tennessee is claiming victory after his school agreed he doesn’t have to read a book about two gay dads to his students.

The teacher enlisted a Christian nationalist legal group to threaten the school if his demands weren’t met.

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Eric Rivera, a teacher at KIPP Antioch College Prep Elementary (a public charter school in South Nashville), said he was ordered in January to read the book, Stella Brings the Family, to his first-grade class. The book, written by Miriam B. Schiffer, is a children’s picture book about a girl with two dads who worries about the upcoming Mother’s Day party at school because she doesn’t have a mom to invite.

Rivera said he asked school administrators for a religious accommodation because the book conflicted with his Christian beliefs.

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“I refused to read a book that had two fathers on the cover and one daughter,” Rivera told WZTV News in Nashville. “I believe that that is not what God designed a marriage to be, and a family to be.”

Rivera said administrators approved his request to have a teacher assistant read the book instead, but the next day, he was called into the principal’s office with a warning: Follow the class lesson plan “with fidelity” or risk being terminated.  

Rivera said he was reassigned to a technology teaching post and later moved to a kindergarten class.

Fearing he could lose his job “for anything that I do based on my religious beliefs,” Rivera enlisted the far-right religious group First Liberty Institute to force the school’s hand, and acknowledge his “religious right” to refuse to read the book.

“We’ve submitted a demand letter demanding that they accommodate Mr. Rivera’s religious practices and that they not discriminate,” said Cliff Martin, Senior Counsel for First Liberty.

Along with Alliance Defending Freedom and other Christian advocacy legal groups, First Liberty is a member of the advisory board of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term.

Martin said Rivera’s religious liberty claim centers on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which requires employers to reasonably accommodate religious beliefs. The school was given 10 days to respond under threat of litigation.

The strong-arm tactic worked.

The school agreed to clear Rivera’s record and accommodate his demand that he won’t read the two gay dads children’s book as part of the school’s first-grade lesson plan.

The bigger win for Rivera and the far-right, however, may be the discord they stirred up around LGBTQ+ content in Tennessee schools.

Rivera was transparent that teaching about any identity outside a Christian nationalist belief system was his real target, telling the Fox News affiliate he believes parents should be more aware of classroom content.

“I just want the whole curriculum to be shown to the parents in a way where they can actually understand,” Rivera said.

The Fox News station said Martin with the First Liberty Institute also raised concerns about whether parents were notified of lesson content under Tennessee law, before adding, “That allegation has not been independently verified.”

Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case brought by parents who said that their First Amendment rights were violated when schools used books that included LGBTQ+ characters.

The decision was 6-3 along ideological lines, with the Republican-appointed justices siding with the religious parents who wanted to opt their children out of reading books like Prince & Knight and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding in the Montgomery County, Maryland, school system.

The ruling said that schools must provide parents the chance to opt-out of classroom lessons that mention LGBTQ+ people, since the mere acknowledgement of LGBTQ+ people’s existence is contrary to their religious beliefs and violates their right to direct their children’s religious upbringing.

Public education advocates warned that the ruling could lead to even more requests for opt-outs of public education on wide-ranging topics, including Earth Day, critical thinking, and anti-drug programs.

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