SCOTUS Pretends Pride Is Porn In Bigot Parents Case

Next they'll make gay kids drink from a separate water fountain FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

According to six Supreme Court justices, this is pornography. In fact, the very existence of LGBTQ+ people is somehow so inherently sexual that mentioning it to children amounts to indoctrination. That is the holding of Mahmoud v. Taylor, which the Court dropped on June 27, the last day of term, right before getting the hell out of Dodge.

The decision isn’t exactly a surprise — during oral argument, Justice Neil “Turmeric” Gorsuch purported to believe that drag queens were definitionally sex workers.

A pre‑K Pride book turned fetish narrative? Are we sure this man isn’t a replicant?

As Jay Willis points out at Balls and Strikes, Gorsuch grossly mischaracterized this children’s picture book, just as he did with the facts in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, AKA the praying football coach case. And just as she did in that prior “religious liberty” case, Justice Sotomayor was forced to include an appendix full of pictures to disprove the florid lies told by her conservative colleagues. This time she included every page of the children’s picture book Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, a story about a little girl named Chloe who is sad that her beloved gay uncle is getting married.

In writing for the majority, Justice Alito claimed that Uncle Bobby’s Wedding “is coy about the precise reason” for Chloe’s distress. This is either an outright lie, or a sign that this Supreme Court justice is unable to comprehend a book aimed at kindergarteners. (Yet another reason parents shouldn’t be able to opt their kids out of English class!) Chloe is sad because she worries that her uncle will have no time for her if he gets married and has a family of his own. Here’s what the book actually says:

Once she realizes that she’ll have two gay uncles to spend time with, they all live happily ever after. But for a handful of parents in Montgomery County, Maryland who filed this lawsuit, the problem wasn’t not enough time with Uncle Bobby and his husband. The problem was their kids meeting Uncle Bobby at all. In their telling, it’s “coercive” for teachers to read stories featuring LGBTQ+ characters to their children, because normalizing behavior they find personally offensive supposedly violates their religious freedom.

“These books—and associated educational instructions provided to teachers—are designed to ‘disrupt’ children’s thinking about sexuality and gender,” Alito warns ominously, adding “Like many books targeted at young children, the books are unmistakably normative. They are clearly designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected.”

And he’s right! It is affirmatively the job of public schools to teach children American values like tolerance and kindness. Roughly one in eleven American adults identifies as LGBTQ+, and it is entirely appropriate for educators to include lessons that “normalize” them, particularly in light of entrenched prejudice against LGBTQ+ people in culture and law. But some religious parents demand the right to continue this stigma by shielding their kids from lessons that say bigotry is wrong.

Of course, American parents are entitled to teach their children any vile, horrible stuff they like in their own homes. But the plaintiffs here want to veto lessons about LGBTQ+ people for everyone’s kids — or at least slap a giant NC-17 sticker on them to identify them as weird or dirty or second class. And the Supreme Court’s conservatives said YES, THAT.

“We conclude that the Board’s introduction of the ‘LGBTQ+-inclusive’ storybooks, combined with its no-opt-out policy, burdens the parents’ right to the free exercise of religion,” they agreed.

The logic here is confounding. The majority relies on the 1972 case Wisconsin v. Yoder, in which the Court held that the compulsory school attendance until age 16 violated the religious freedom of Amish parents, who wanted to keep their children home after age 14. But the Yoder plaintiffs never demanded that the public school system conform to their religious beliefs; they wanted to pull their kids out of school two years early so they could work on the farm.

From this majority infers a right for these parents to keep their kids in Montgomery County public schools and receive religious accommodations.

The Court’s conservatives reject the idea that the religious parents should educate their children at home or in private schools if they want to inculcate bigotry. Instead, building on prior cases where they ruled that it did not violate the Establishment Clause to require states to offer tax subsidies to private religious schools, the majority recasts public school attendance as a “public benefit,” and says parents are entitled to access it while demanding it conform to their religious beliefs.

As we have previously held, when the government chooses to provide public benefits, it may not “condition the availability of [those] benefits upon a recipient’s willingness to surrender his religiously impelled status.” Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, 582 U. S. 449, 462 (2017) (internal quotations marks and alterations omitted). That is what the Board has done here. Public education is a public benefit, and the government cannot “condition” its “availability” on parents’ willingness to accept a burden on their religious exercise. Ibid. Moreover, since education is compulsory in Maryland, see Md. Educ. Code Ann. §7–301(a– 1)(1), the parents are not being asked simply to forgo a public benefit. They have an obligation—enforceable by fine or imprisonment—to send their children to public school unless they find an adequate substitute. §§7–301(a)(3), (e).10 And many parents cannot afford such a substitute.

But this logic inverts the holding in Yoder entirely. The parents in Yoder weren’t trying to force the public school to cancel “worldly” lessons and teach everyone’s kids how to churn butter. They wanted out of the project entirely. Here the religious parents want to keep their kids in taxpayer-funded schools, while exempting them from lessons of general applicability.

The majority makes much of Montgomery County’s other opt-outs, where parents can exempt their kids from things like sex-ed and religious observances, such as singing Christmas carols. But that framing bakes the stigma into the question. There’s nothing inherently sexual about gay people getting married, which they are entitled to do in every state of the union. And the opt-outs from the Christmas concert are designed to protect children from narrow, sectarian religious coercion. Acknowledging that trans people are entitled to respect isn’t a tenet of one particular religious sect — it’s basic human decency.

Seen in this light, Gorsuch pretending to be confused about drag queens seems a lot less funny. Because this isn’t parody, it’s precedent. Likening a puppy in a Pride bandana with leather daddies and equating drag with sex work reduces LGBTQ+ identity to mere kink. And treating gay people’s very existence as something presumptively risqué is inherently stigmatizing.

Indeed that was the animating logic of the Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, where the majority held that relegating gay couples to second-class marriages or domestic partnerships “demeans the dignity of these couples for no legitimate reason” and “humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.” Here the Court demands that schools do just that, segregating lessons about LGBTQ+ characters like pornographic magazines and dehumanizing queer kids and students with gay parents by slapping them with a giant warning sticker to label them as second class.

In Obergefell, Justice Kennedy wrote that “there is dignity in the bond between two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to make such profound choices.” Just ten years later, the Court is snatching that dignity away.

In truth, Mahmoud v. Taylor is no victory for religious liberty. It’s a win for moral panic masquerading as constitutional protection. Now that LGBTQ+ representation itself has been effectively defined as pornographic, the likely next step will be heavy self-censorship. Fearful that they will be sued by parents seeking to vindicate this newly-discovered right to shield their children from anything that offends their religious sensibilities, schools will start stripping their curricula and libraries from anything that normalizes queer people.

Books with LGBTQ+ characters shouldn’t require a trigger warning in the classroom just because some parents insist on imposing their religious prejudices on everyone else. And Gorsuch’s weird fetish fantasies shouldn’t distract us from the fact that the Court’s conservatives just enshrining a right to impose bigotry on public school students by blaspheming against the Establishment Clause.