On Friday, the Supreme Court gave bigoted parents their biggest legal gift of the Trump era. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the court ruled that parents can opt their children out of public school education that doesn’t comport with their religious hangups. The vote was 6–3, and broke along the usual bigot vs. liberal lines.....

Alito’s opinion is flatly homophobic. There is no other way to put it. Alito is hysterically concerned about pronouns, repeatedly uses “scare quotes” around the acronym LGBTQ+, and consistently mischaracterizes the books at issue. As part of his supporting evidence, Alito includes pictures from the books in his opinion—pictures that, to the normal eye, merely show LGBTQ people existing. But Alito includes them as evidence of the deeply subversive nature of these books.

Here’s how Alito describes Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, a story about a man who gets married to another man as told through the eyes of his niece:

The atmosphere is jubilant after Uncle Bobby and his boyfriend announce their engagement. (“Everyone was smiling and talking and crying and laughing” (emphasis added)). The book’s main character, Chloe, does not share this excitement. “‘I don’t understand!’” she exclaims, “‘Why is Uncle Bobby getting married?’” The book is coy about the precise reason for Chloe’s question, but the question is used to tee up a direct message to young readers: “‘Bobby and Jamie love each other,’ said Mummy. ‘When grown-up people love each other that much, sometimes they get married.’” The book therefore presents a specific, if subtle, message about marriage. It asserts that two people can get married, regardless of whether they are of the same or the opposite sex, so long as they “‘love each other.’”

....Alito is the one being “coy.” He’s trying to suggest that Chloe shares his bigoted, retrograde views on gay marriage, without remembering that children are not born broken and curdled like Alito is. Chloe doesn’t care that Uncle Bobby is gay; Alito does. And that’s why Alito thinks the book can be drummed out of public schools. He gets to the heart of his point here:

The book’s narrative arc reaches its peak with the actual event of Uncle Bobby’s wedding, which is presented as a joyous event that is met with universal approval. And again, there are many Americans who would view the event that way, and it goes without saying that they have every right to do so. But other Americans wish to present a different moral message to their children. And their ability to present that message is undermined when the exact opposite message is positively reinforced in the public school classroom at a very young age.

Yes, Sam, the book presents a gay wedding as something to be universally approved. The point of the book is to reinforce the message, at a very young age, that being an evil bigot is not cool. How I wish someone would have read Uncle Bobby’s Wedding to Sam Alito when he was a young child. The entire country might have been saved from his unhinged bile......

Perhaps the most dangerous part of Alito’s opinion is that he essentially declares all public schools must act like religious schools, because the cost of religious education is too high for some parents. He writes:

Private elementary schools in Montgomery County are expensive; many cost $10,000 or more per year prior to financial aid. And homeschooling comes with a hefty price as well; it requires at least one parent to stay at home during the normal workday to educate children, thereby forgoing additional income opportunities. It is both insulting and legally unsound to tell parents that they must abstain from public education in order to raise their children in their religious faiths, when alternatives can be prohibitively expensive and they already contribute to financing the public schools.

This paragraph quite simply redefines the nature of public education in this country. Public schools are supposed to be good for everybody, including people who don’t want God in their schools, precisely because they’re free (after a fashion… just imagine I’ve written a 2,000-word tangent here about property taxes and the way public schools ensconce wealth disparity). Alito reforms that idea to say that, because they’re free, public schools must now give religious parents all the benefits of private education, including support for their bigotry.....

That’s an obvious legal principle, and an uncontroversial one, unless you hate gay people. But for Alito and his Republican friends on the court, their animus toward the LGBTQ community has led them to try to change the very nature of public education.

It’s a terrible decision. But we live in terrible times.