JURISPRUDENCE
How Sam Alito Inadvertently Revealed His Own Homophobia From the Bench

BY MARK JOSEPH STERN
APRIL 23, 20255:43 PM


Sam Alito was confused by, or intentionally distorted, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding. Photo illustration by Slate. Images via Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images and Simon & Schuster.

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

The Supreme Court’s conservative justices unleashed a torrent of homophobia on Tuesday as they debated the meaning and propriety of several LGBTQ-themed children’s books. Throughout arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, these justices voiced concern—and at times, outright disgust—toward these books for portraying LGBTQ+ people as normal and loving. They argued that parents should have a First Amendment right to shield their children from such material in public schools, ostensibly to protect them from exposure to diverse families under the auspices of religious liberty. Justice Samuel Alito reserved special ire for Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, a gentle picture book that homophobic parents initially attempted to censor when it debuted in 2008. Alito suggested, over the objections of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, that the book is devious propaganda aimed at indoctrinating children who harbor reservations about same-sex marriage.

He is wrong. Alito did not just arguably miss the point of the book; he fundamentally distorted it. As author Sarah Brannen told me on Wednesday, “The book is written very simply, in language a 5-year-old can understand.” Brannen speculated that Alito “was being deliberately misleading?? in his summary of Uncle Bobby’s Wedding from the bench, part of a broader effort to vilify both the school board and same-sex families. This paranoid homophobia lies at the heart of the whole case. The Republican-appointed justices made it abundantly clear that they think woke educators are inculcating children with radical, pro-LGBTQ+ values in violation of their parents’ religious beliefs. These justices sound eager to give parents a veto over classroom materials to prevent their children from learning about LGBTQ+ families. And they have zero concern for the profoundly stigmatizing message this censorship sends to children who belong to those very families.

Brannen wrote and illustrated Uncle Bobby’s Wedding in 2005, shortly after same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts. Upon publication in 2008, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding faced multiple challenges from parents who wanted it removed from the library, becoming the eighth most challenged book of the year in the United States. In 2022, Maryland’s Montgomery County Board of Education chose to include it on the curriculum for young students, prompting some religious parents to “opt out” their children from seeing the books. The board eventually scrapped its opt-out policy, finding that it had become unworkable: So many parents were objecting that the policy gave them a veto power over the curricula, with educators scrapping materials rather than managing the logistics of endless opt-outs. The parents then sued, alleging that the board violated their First Amendment right to free exercise by denying them the chance to shield their children from LGBTQ+ literature.

{snip}