Samuel Alito’s “Pride Puppy” Ruling Is a Disgrace to the Supreme Court

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

The Supreme Court dealt a blow to inclusive public education on Friday, declaring in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents have a constitutional right to prevent their children from seeing books in school that feature LGBTQ+ families. A public school system in Maryland had placed these books in classrooms as part of an effort to promote respect for different kinds of families. In response, religious parents sued, arguing that the materials violated their religious freedom by exposing their children to depictions of LGBTQ+ people. In a 6–3 opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, the conservative supermajority agreed, declaring that parents must be allowed to prevent their children from seeing such material. Alito asserted that “the storybooks unmistakably convey a particular viewpoint about same-sex marriage” from which religious parents must be able to shield their children.

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the ruling’s disastrous consequences for public education and LGBTQ+ equality on this week’s episode of Amicus. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: I want to talk about a gut-punch case, Mahmoud v. Taylor. It’s easy to get bogged down in the details of what is and is not actually in these books. But this is a sea change for parental rights and also the very nature of public education.

Mark Joseph Stern: This is a direct assault on public education and the democratic principles that undergird it. The case involves books with LGBTQ+ characters and themes that children might see on a shelf in the classroom or that might be read during story time. One is Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, which is a lovely book about a little girl whose uncle is getting married; she learns that families change and that’s OK. It is not about her uncle being gay. There’s another, Pride Puppy!, which follows a little dog who gets lost at a Pride parade. These are G-rated books. The parents’ only objection is that they don’t think that LGBTQ+ people should have equality under the law and they don’t want their children to think it’s OK to be LGBTQ+. And when they learned that these books would be in classrooms, they argued that having their kids exposed to this material would violate their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.

The problem, of course, is that parents don’t traditionally have an individual veto over public education. Parents do not get to dictate exactly what is and is not taught in the classroom. And one of the goals of public education is to expose children to different kinds of ideas and different kinds of people that they wouldn’t normally see. Yet, on Friday, the Supreme Court decreed that parents have a brand-new First Amendment right to veto their children’s exposure to materials that violate their own religious beliefs. If the parents don’t like gay people, then their kids must be “opted out” from seeing a book featuring gay people in the classroom. The kids have to stand up and walk out while the teacher reads Uncle Bobby’s Wedding. This newfound right is not remotely rooted in precedent, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in her powerful dissent.

It’s basically a parental veto power over what’s taught in the classroom.

Exactly right. The court calls this an “opt-out policy.” But the schools have already said that they cannot possibly manage a system in which every student has the right to opt out of seeing anything their parents don’t like. So they’re just going to have to pull these books from classrooms altogether. Otherwise, they would have to enforce an unmanageable system of opt-outs at constant pain of a potentially ruinous lawsuit. And that’s the whole goal of this case. It’s not just to “protect” the children of religious parents. It’s to get these books out of classrooms and ensure that children do not ever see LGBTQ+ people in the literature they’re exposed to at school.

I hope this can be a moment for parents and their kids to sit down and have a real conversation about what religious liberty means, and how it cannot be the Trojan horse by which we destroy everybody else’s rights and dignity.

And yet that’s exactly what it is in this case. Think about the message it sends to children of LGBTQ+ parents when their peers have to walk out of the classroom before Uncle Bobby’s Wedding is read aloud. Or when the school bans Uncle Bobby’s Wedding from the classroom altogether. It tells them that LGBTQ+ families like their own are so terrible that their peers can’t even be exposed to a book about them. That is a violently stigmatizing message, and it’s one the Supreme Court just enshrined into the First Amendment.

It’s worth looking at the appendix of Alito’s opinion, which features unbelievably sweet illustrations from these books of families that don’t necessarily look like the Alitos. It’s as if this appendix is supposed to embody the horror that we are saving our children from. And it’s so staggering, as though the reaction should be universal: Thank God children don’t have to see these images!

It’s staggering, and let’s be clear about this: It’s bigoted. Alito’s opinion is deeply homophobic. He reframes these utterly innocent children’s books as insidious propaganda designed to brainwash children into supporting LGBTQ+ rights. But this is not propaganda unless you look at it through the lens of homophobia, and unless you think that the mere depiction of gay people as being acceptable is noxious and something you must protect children against.

The justices who signed on to this decision should be ashamed of themselves, and some of them should know better. We don’t expect much of Alito, a notorious homophobe who thinks a book is unacceptable for children because it happens to humanize gay people as deserving of love. But Neil Gorsuch? Brett Kavanaugh? Even John Roberts? I think on some level they know that this opinion and its consequences will send a very strong signal to public school students that there is something wrong with being LGBTQ+. That a book depicting us as normal people living our lives is somehow insidious propaganda. And I guess they just don’t care. But it’s a vile opinion and a vile holding, and it will harm many, many children in Maryland and beyond.