Sam Alito Komedy Klassics
By 
What a card!
Alito asks a hypothetical about a Black Santa at the mall who doesn't want to have his picture taken with a child dressed up in a KKK outfit. It culminates with Alito quipping:
"You do see a lot of Black children in Ku Klux Klan outfits, right? All the time." pic.twitter.com/nmQCSjcUHF— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) December 5, 2022
The “best” part is that Alito’s idiotic joke about Black children wearing Klan outfits was his attempt to save himself after the Colorado Solicitor General made the extremely obvious point that Alito’s hypothetical was stupid given that Klan membership is not a protected class under federal or state civil rights laws. (Not yet, anyway.) Meanwhile, the tone with which Alito says “JDate” makes the first exchange even creepier that it already looks on paper.
As I said recently, while Alito has always been exactly this reactionary, he used to be better than any other member of the Court’s reactionary faction in partially masking that behind technical-sounding jargon. Between his brain disintegrating in the acid bath that is the wingnut media ecosphere and Republicans having a supermajority on the Court he just doesn’t give a shit anymore, and it’s not clear if he’s even capable of making an intelligent argument anymore even if he needed to.
In the same oral argument, Neil Gorsuch asserts that training employees to comply with civil rights statutes is fascism:
It does not bode well for the future of civil rights law that Gorsuch believes a state imposes "reeducation training" on employers when it reminds them how to comply with nondiscrimination rules.— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) December 5, 2022
Hopefully Gorsuch will also be able to rid us of the tyranny of “employees must wash their hands after using the restroom” signs, the 21st century gulag.
The end game here is clear — and was even when Kennedy was trying to deny the obvious with his trademark fake-minimalist bullshit. Civil rights laws will essentially only apply at the consent of the individual because invoking any kind of religious objection will be a get-out-of-nondiscrimination-laws free card.