On July 4th, thinking through the Supreme Court's attempt to erase queer people

Allowing parents to "opt-out" of any lessons for their kids that include LGBTQ characters, the court it attempting to make us invisible. It won't work.

Budapest Pride, photo: Reddit, readingrainbow47

Of course, it’s the irony of ironies that the president who created the Supreme Court that is now policing pornography for adults online and forcing the teaching in schools of only traditional ideas of family and sexuality is someone who is accused of sexual assault by many women and has been found liable in civil court for sexual abuse and, as a judge confirmed, rape.

But that’s where we are. The Supreme Court’s conservatives—the current MAGA court—are staunch bigots who are not even trying any longer to hide their contempt for LGBTQ equality.

They, like many hypocritical conservatives, hold up the banner of “parental rights”—including last week in Mahmoud v. Taylor, their “don’t say gay” ruling which is rebranded as an “opt-out” of queer storybooks—yet they’ve ruled against parents working with their children’s doctors to give them gender-affirming care, allowing states to ban it. So there is no logic or consistency. Just bigotry twisted into feeble decisions.

Chipping away at marriage equality, the MAGA court ruled in 2023 that it’s perfectly fine to discriminate against gay couples in public accommodations, and, with Mahmoud v. Taylor last week, it is now creating an environment for gay and lesbian married couples in which their own children will be stigmatized in schools by the parents of their kids’ classmates who will “opted-out” from learning about them as equal human beings.

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Justice Sotomayor, in a strong dissent to the majority opinion, pointed to how the decision will allow for parents to pull their children from school regarding teaching about almost anything—from, say, learning about Passover and Jewish people, to learning about women in non-traditional roles—based on their “religious freedom.” The same is true of the court’s ruling allowing for discrimination of gay couples in public accommodations, which will allow for discrimination against other groups.

The conservative justices seem not to be concerned about that. They’re blinded by their bias against LGBTQ people, and they thus view anything queer as much different—a terrible sin in the eyes of Christians, a perversion—warranting special treatment to allow for discrimination against that group and seemingly only that group.

It’s true that their rulings open the door to exclusions of other groups, but they likely don’t think it’s probable that some high-powered law firm—like these well-funded Christian nationalist firms, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, who’ve taken the anti-LGBTQ cases to the courts—would take these other cases. And even if a case gets to them, they’ll deal with it at that time, contorting themselves and spitting out some nonsensical ruling.

Some might be confounded by the fact that the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that gay, lesbian, bisexual. and transgender people are protected from employment discrimination under Title VII of of the Civil Rights Act—which bans discrimination in employment based on “sex.” Justice Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, even wrote the decision for the majority.

But that was before Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh joined the court. And Gorsuch, who claims to be an originalist and thus viewed the law using the word “sex” as applicable in that case, left a lot of room in that decision for exemptions in the future—including based on religious liberty, explicitly stating it. So a case can come up at any time in which the court will find an exemption. As NPR reported at the time:

Gorsuch noted, for instance, that some employers might have valid religious objections to hiring gay or trans workers. But he added that worries about how the 1964 civil rights law "will intersect with religious liberty are nothing new," pointing to the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act as a "super statute" that may offer a potential lifeline to employers who object, on religious grounds, to hiring gay and trans individuals.

And let’s not forget that Clarence Thomas wants marriage equality revisited, and that Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who was fired for not issues marriage licenses to same-sex couples—and who the Supreme Court denied a hearing on her appeal in 2020—is now trying to get the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell itself.

But as I write this on July 4th, the day Americans celebrate freedom and the Constitution—however much the extreme right and the MAGA maniacs have distorted it all—I look back on Pride month across the country. It was massive, particularly in New York, where a million people turned out to march. It seemed more people turned out because the stakes are much higher. Many cowardly companies had pulled sponsorship, fearful in the Trump 2.0 era. But this only shows how the celebration and the anger at Pride was truly authentic—back to its roots—and not a corporate parade.

Then I looked at the photos of Budapest Pride, pictured atop this post, where up to 200,000 people braved the heavily policed streets last week even as authoritarian Victor Orban—whom Trump models himself on—had banned Pride parades and said anyone who violated the ban would be arrested.

But there were no arrests. There were too many people. Orban’s political party is down 15 points in polls heading into an election next year. It’s too soon to tell, but if he goes down, LGBTQ people will have been at the vanguard—as we’ve always been.

So, as daunting as the current state is—the appalling stripping of queer rights by Trump himself and by the MAGA court—we should realize, as they did under an authoritarian in Hungary who has a far tighter grip, that they will never make us invisible. All of our triumphs are followed by fierce backlash, as I’ve noted many times, causing us to fight back. And if we fight, we win. That’s the spirit of Independence Day you should think about today.