{"id":125368,"date":"2025-07-03T09:02:40","date_gmt":"2025-07-03T17:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/07\/03\/scotus-pretends-pride-is-porn-in-bigot-parents-case\/"},"modified":"2025-07-03T09:02:40","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T17:02:40","slug":"scotus-pretends-pride-is-porn-in-bigot-parents-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/07\/03\/scotus-pretends-pride-is-porn-in-bigot-parents-case\/","title":{"rendered":"SCOTUS Pretends Pride Is Porn In Bigot Parents Case"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to six Supreme Court justices, this<\/em> 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<\/a> of Mahmoud\u202fv.\u202fTaylor<\/em>, which the Court dropped on June 27, the last day of term, right before getting the hell out of Dodge.<\/p>\n

The decision isn\u2019t exactly a surprise \u2014\u00a0during oral argument, Justice Neil \u201cTurmeric\u201d<\/a> Gorsuch purported to believe that drag queens were definitionally sex workers.<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A pre\u2011K Pride book turned fetish narrative? Are we sure this man isn\u2019t a replicant?<\/p>\n

As Jay Willis points out at Balls and Strikes<\/a>, Gorsuch grossly mischaracterized this children\u2019s picture book, just as he did<\/a> with the facts in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District<\/em>, AKA the praying football coach case. And just as she<\/em> did in that prior \u201creligious liberty\u201d 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\u2019s picture book Uncle Bobby\u2019s Wedding<\/em>, a story about a little girl named Chloe who is sad that her beloved gay uncle is getting married.<\/p>\n

In writing for the majority, Justice Alito claimed that Uncle Bobby\u2019s Wedding <\/em>\u201cis coy about the precise reason\u201d for Chloe\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s what the book actually says:<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once she realizes that she\u2019ll have two<\/em> 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\u2019t not enough<\/em> time with Uncle Bobby and his husband. The problem was their kids meeting Uncle Bobby at all<\/em>. In their telling, it\u2019s \u201ccoercive\u201d for teachers to read stories featuring LGBTQ+ characters to their children, because normalizing behavior they find personally offensive supposedly violates their religious freedom.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese books\u2014and associated educational instructions provided to teachers\u2014are designed to \u2018disrupt\u2019 children\u2019s thinking about sexuality and gender,\u201d Alito warns ominously, adding \u201cLike 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he\u2019s right! It is affirmatively the job of public schools to teach children American values like tolerance and kindness. Roughly one in eleven<\/a> American adults identifies as LGBTQ+, and it is entirely appropriate<\/em> for educators to include lessons that \u201cnormalize\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s<\/em> kids \u2014 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\u2019s conservatives said YES, THAT.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe conclude that the Board\u2019s introduction of the \u2018LGBTQ+-inclusive\u2019 storybooks, combined with its no-opt-out policy, burdens the parents\u2019 right to the free exercise of religion,\u201d they agreed.<\/p>\n

The logic here is confounding. The majority relies on the 1972 case Wisconsin v. Yoder<\/em>, 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<\/em> plaintiffs never demanded that the public school system conform to their<\/em> religious beliefs; they wanted to pull their kids out of school two years early so they could work on the farm.<\/p>\n

From this majority infers a right for these parents to keep their kids in<\/em> Montgomery County public schools and receive religious accommodations.<\/p>\n

The Court\u2019s 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 \u201cpublic benefit,\u201d and says parents are entitled to access it while demanding it conform to their religious beliefs.<\/p>\n

\n

As we have previously held, when the government chooses to provide public benefits, it may not \u201ccondition the availability of [those] benefits upon a recipient\u2019s willingness to surrender his religiously impelled status.\u201d 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 \u201ccondition\u201d its \u201cavailability\u201d on parents\u2019 willingness to accept a burden on their religious exercise. Ibid. Moreover, since education is compulsory in Maryland, see Md. Educ. Code Ann. \u00a77\u2013301(a\u2013 1)(1), the parents are not being asked simply to forgo a public benefit. They have an obligation\u2014enforceable by fine or imprisonment\u2014to send their children to public school unless they find an adequate substitute. \u00a7\u00a77\u2013301(a)(3), (e).10 And many parents cannot afford such a substitute.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But this logic inverts the holding in Yoder<\/em> entirely. The parents in Yoder<\/em> weren\u2019t trying to force the public school to cancel \u201cworldly\u201d lessons and teach everyone\u2019s kids how to churn butter. They wanted out of the project entirely. Here the religious parents want to keep<\/em> their kids in taxpayer-funded schools, while exempting them from lessons of general applicability.<\/p>\n

The majority makes much of Montgomery County\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/em> narrow, sectarian religious coercion. Acknowledging that trans people are entitled to respect isn\u2019t a tenet of one particular religious sect \u2014 it\u2019s basic human decency.<\/p>\n

Seen in this light, Gorsuch pretending to be confused about drag queens seems a lot less funny. Because this isn\u2019t parody, it\u2019s 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\u2019s very existence<\/em> as something presumptively risqu\u00e9 is inherently stigmatizing.<\/p>\n

Indeed that was the animating logic of the Court\u2019s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges<\/em>, where the majority held that relegating gay couples to second-class marriages or domestic partnerships \u201cdemeans the dignity of these couples for no legitimate reason\u201d and \u201chumiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

In Obergefell<\/em>, Justice Kennedy wrote that \u201cthere is dignity in the bond between two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to make such profound choices.\u201d Just ten years later, the Court is snatching that dignity away.<\/p>\n

In truth, Mahmoud v. Taylor<\/em> is no victory for religious liberty. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Books with LGBTQ+ characters shouldn\u2019t require a trigger warning in the classroom just because some parents insist on imposing their religious prejudices on everyone else. And Gorsuch\u2019s weird fetish fantasies shouldn\u2019t distract us from the fact that the Court\u2019s conservatives just enshrining a right to impose bigotry on public school students by blaspheming against the Establishment Clause.<\/p>\n

Subscribe to read more at Law and Chaos\u2026.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Liz Dye<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Andrew Torrez<\/a>\u00a0produce the Law and Chaos\u00a0Substack\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0podcast<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em> You can subscribe to their Substack by clicking the logo:\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The post SCOTUS Pretends Pride Is Porn In Bigot Parents Case<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

According to six Supreme Court justices, this<\/em> 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<\/a> of Mahmoud\u202fv.\u202fTaylor<\/em>, which the Court dropped on June 27, the last day of term, right before getting the hell out of Dodge.<\/p>\n

The decision isn\u2019t exactly a surprise \u2014\u00a0during oral argument, Justice Neil \u201cTurmeric\u201d<\/a> Gorsuch purported to believe that drag queens were definitionally sex workers.<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A pre\u2011K Pride book turned fetish narrative? Are we sure this man isn\u2019t a replicant?<\/p>\n

As Jay Willis points out at Balls and Strikes<\/a>, Gorsuch grossly mischaracterized this children\u2019s picture book, just as he did<\/a> with the facts in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District<\/em>, AKA the praying football coach case. And just as she<\/em> did in that prior \u201creligious liberty\u201d 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\u2019s picture book Uncle Bobby\u2019s Wedding<\/em>, a story about a little girl named Chloe who is sad that her beloved gay uncle is getting married.<\/p>\n

In writing for the majority, Justice Alito claimed that Uncle Bobby\u2019s Wedding <\/em>\u201cis coy about the precise reason\u201d for Chloe\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s what the book actually says:<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once she realizes that she\u2019ll have two<\/em> 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\u2019t not enough<\/em> time with Uncle Bobby and his husband. The problem was their kids meeting Uncle Bobby at all<\/em>. In their telling, it\u2019s \u201ccoercive\u201d for teachers to read stories featuring LGBTQ+ characters to their children, because normalizing behavior they find personally offensive supposedly violates their religious freedom.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese books\u2014and associated educational instructions provided to teachers\u2014are designed to \u2018disrupt\u2019 children\u2019s thinking about sexuality and gender,\u201d Alito warns ominously, adding \u201cLike 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he\u2019s right! It is affirmatively the job of public schools to teach children American values like tolerance and kindness. Roughly one in eleven<\/a> American adults identifies as LGBTQ+, and it is entirely appropriate<\/em> for educators to include lessons that \u201cnormalize\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s<\/em> kids \u2014 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\u2019s conservatives said YES, THAT.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe conclude that the Board\u2019s introduction of the \u2018LGBTQ+-inclusive\u2019 storybooks, combined with its no-opt-out policy, burdens the parents\u2019 right to the free exercise of religion,\u201d they agreed.<\/p>\n

The logic here is confounding. The majority relies on the 1972 case Wisconsin v. Yoder<\/em>, 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<\/em> plaintiffs never demanded that the public school system conform to their<\/em> religious beliefs; they wanted to pull their kids out of school two years early so they could work on the farm.<\/p>\n

From this majority infers a right for these parents to keep their kids in<\/em> Montgomery County public schools and receive religious accommodations.<\/p>\n

The Court\u2019s 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 \u201cpublic benefit,\u201d and says parents are entitled to access it while demanding it conform to their religious beliefs.<\/p>\n

\n

As we have previously held, when the government chooses to provide public benefits, it may not \u201ccondition the availability of [those] benefits upon a recipient\u2019s willingness to surrender his religiously impelled status.\u201d 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 \u201ccondition\u201d its \u201cavailability\u201d on parents\u2019 willingness to accept a burden on their religious exercise. Ibid. Moreover, since education is compulsory in Maryland, see Md. Educ. Code Ann. \u00a77\u2013301(a\u2013 1)(1), the parents are not being asked simply to forgo a public benefit. They have an obligation\u2014enforceable by fine or imprisonment\u2014to send their children to public school unless they find an adequate substitute. \u00a7\u00a77\u2013301(a)(3), (e).10 And many parents cannot afford such a substitute.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But this logic inverts the holding in Yoder<\/em> entirely. The parents in Yoder<\/em> weren\u2019t trying to force the public school to cancel \u201cworldly\u201d lessons and teach everyone\u2019s kids how to churn butter. They wanted out of the project entirely. Here the religious parents want to keep<\/em> their kids in taxpayer-funded schools, while exempting them from lessons of general applicability.<\/p>\n

The majority makes much of Montgomery County\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/em> narrow, sectarian religious coercion. Acknowledging that trans people are entitled to respect isn\u2019t a tenet of one particular religious sect \u2014 it\u2019s basic human decency.<\/p>\n

Seen in this light, Gorsuch pretending to be confused about drag queens seems a lot less funny. Because this isn\u2019t parody, it\u2019s 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\u2019s very existence<\/em> as something presumptively risqu\u00e9 is inherently stigmatizing.<\/p>\n

Indeed that was the animating logic of the Court\u2019s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges<\/em>, where the majority held that relegating gay couples to second-class marriages or domestic partnerships \u201cdemeans the dignity of these couples for no legitimate reason\u201d and \u201chumiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

In Obergefell<\/em>, Justice Kennedy wrote that \u201cthere is dignity in the bond between two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to make such profound choices.\u201d Just ten years later, the Court is snatching that dignity away.<\/p>\n

In truth, Mahmoud v. Taylor<\/em> is no victory for religious liberty. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Books with LGBTQ+ characters shouldn\u2019t require a trigger warning in the classroom just because some parents insist on imposing their religious prejudices on everyone else. And Gorsuch\u2019s weird fetish fantasies shouldn\u2019t distract us from the fact that the Court\u2019s conservatives just enshrining a right to impose bigotry on public school students by blaspheming against the Establishment Clause.<\/p>\n

Subscribe to read more at Law and Chaos\u2026.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Liz Dye<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Andrew Torrez<\/a>\u00a0produce the Law and Chaos\u00a0Substack\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0podcast<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em> You can subscribe to their Substack by clicking the logo:\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The post SCOTUS Pretends Pride Is Porn In Bigot Parents Case<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u202fv.\u202fTaylor, which the Court dropped on June 27, the last day of term, right before getting the hell out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":125369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/law-and-chaos-logo-liz-dye-300x153-LfG9us.jpeg?fit=300%2C153&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}