Neil Gorsuch’s homophobic alternate fiction
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Given the opportunity to combine homophobic hysteria with one of his favorite pastimes — completely inventing “facts” in a religious freedom case — Neil Gorsuch really delivered this week:
Among the more distressing moments during oral argument in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a Supreme Court case challenging a Maryland school district’s use of children’s books with LGBTQ characters, came when Justice Neil Gorsuch started asking questions about bondage. Gorsuch wanted to drill down on the particulars of Pride Puppy, a rhyming alphabet book about a family searching for their lost dog at a pride parade. (Don’t worry, they find the little rascal by the letter V.)
Gorsuch, however, had other subjects on his mind. “That’s the one where [students] are supposed to look for the leather and things—and bondage? Things like that, right?” he asked the district’s lawyer, Alan Schoenfeld. “A sex worker? Sex worker, right?”
After Schoenfeld responded that, no, this picture book for prekindergartners does not include depictions of bondage or sex workers, Gorsuch sounded genuinely surprised and more than a little incredulous. “No? I thought—gosh,” he told Schoenfeld. “I read it!”
I’m sure you will be very surprised to learn that Gorsuch, like his colleague Sam, either can’t understand a book written for 5-year-olds or is just lying about its contents:
On Bluesky, a baffled Stevenson theorized that Gorsuch did not actually read the book, or, in the alternative, harbors some profoundly misguided ideas about the information women intend to convey by wearing leather jackets in public. McLaughlin similarly pointed to the leather-and-bondage moment as evidence that Gorusch is either a “terrible reader” or simply lying about having read a 30-page children’s story. “I thought telling the whole truth and nothing but truth was kind of the whole deal in court?” she wrote. “Especially the literal highest one in America? No??”
I wanted to try and figure out how Gorsuch—who, again, claimed to have read Pride Puppy in its entirety—could have possibly reached the erroneous conclusion that it introduces children to the worlds of BDSM and sex work. So, I searched the record in Mahmoud v. Taylor for any references to leather, bondage, drag, or sex workers. For reasons that will become apparent, I also searched for “Marsha P. Johnson.”
To my immense relief, no one in this case—not the parents challenging the books, not the district defending them, not the dozens of amici who submitted briefs in the Fourth Circuit or the Supreme Court—asserts that Pride Puppy explicitly discusses “bondage.” (And, to be clear, it does not.) The record in Taylor contains only two passing references to bondage-adjacent subjects: First, the petitioners’ brief mentions a news story about teachers in New York who read a book set at a pride parade (not Pride Puppy) that depicts “leather BDSM attire.” Second, in their complaint and their motion for a preliminary injunction, the petitioners argued that Pride Puppy inaccurately frames pride parades as a “laudable family experience,” and support this assertion with a Washington Post op-ed in which the author describes seeing a “bare-chested man in dark sunglasses whose black suspenders clipped into a leather thong” at a pride parade. Astute readers will note that neither passage has anything to do with the content of Pride Puppy, which is the book Gorsuch ostensibly read, and what this case is about.
On the other hand, the briefs filed by the parents and their amici are absolutely riddled with references to “leather,” along with “lip ring” and “underwear,” as examples of the supposedly salacious bonus items to which unsuspecting Pride Puppy readers may be exposed. I am sure you will be unsurprised to learn that none of these briefs acknowledge that the “leather” is, again, an expensive piece of outwear, or that the “underwear” is worn Superman-style by a person with tights underneath.
Telephone for authoritarians, and the excepts capture only part of how crazily inaccurate Gorsuch’s descriptions are. Also click through for a cameo from family separation enthusiast Sarah Isgur.