We Regret to Inform You That Neil Gorsuch Is Doing Some Bullshit Again
How did he end up believing that a rhyming alphabet storybook about a lost dog introduces children to bondage and sex workers? Let’s find out together!
This week’s newsletter was supposed to be a very serious investigation into an exchange during oral argument in Mahmoud v. Taylor earlier this week, when Justice Neil Gorsuch, to the horror of everyone in attendance, started asking questions about “bondage.” Specifically, I wanted to find out how in the world Gorsuch arrived at the farcically wrong conclusion that Pride Puppy, a rhyming alphabet book about a lost dog that Gorusch claims to have read in its 30-page entirety, exposes innocent schoolchildren to scandalous images of “bondage” and “sex workers.”
Here, listen for yourself to perhaps the most distressing imaginable series of words that could come out of this man’s mouth:
Pride Puppy is among several books with LGBTQ characters at issue in this case, and on Tuesday, the conservative justices spent lots of time getting very upset at what they imagined the books to be and to say. Gorsuch, of course, has a storied history of massaging the facts of “religious freedom” case to better suit his policy agenda, so when I started digging into the record, I figured that the roots of his Pride Puppy diatribe would turn out to be some accursed combination of embarrassing, stupid, and bad-faith.
Even so, I was unprepared for just how embarrassing, stupid, and bad-faith the explanation turned out to be, and so the whole thing ballooned from a short newsletter to a post on the Balls & Strikes website. To give you a sense of scale here, what appears below in the blue circle is what Neil Gorsuch, a 57-year-old man, claimed to be an age-inappropriate depiction of a “sex worker” in a children’s storybook, thus meriting the Court’s urgent intervention.
The rest of the story is here. Please read it, provided that anything throwable and/or breakable is safely out of arm’s reach.
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.
This Week In Balls & Strikes
I Think Neil Gorsuch Is Lying About a “Religious Freedom” Case Again, Jay Willis
How did Gorsuch end up believing that Pride Puppy, a rhyming alphabet storybook about a lost dog at a pride parade, introduces children to bondage and sex workers? Let’s find out together!
The Conservative Justices Are Inventing the Religious Liberty Case They Want to Decide, Madiba Dennie
A “scant,” “sparse,” and “threadbare” record is no obstacle to the Court’s efforts to extend special legal protections to conservative Christians.
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Stories with LGBTQ characters only “indoctrinate” children if you believe that LGBTQ people are not worthy of being treated with dignity and respect.
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This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated
One of the Most Complex Cases of the Supreme Court Term Is Also One of the Most Straightforward, Robyn Nicole Sanders, Slate
“The purpose of public education was never to spare us from one another. It was to prepare us for the world we share. And the promise of the First Amendment was never that we would be protected from difference but that we might grow strong enough to live in its presence.”
Oklahoma Is Asking the Supreme Court to Ignore History, Adam Laats, The Atlantic
“Either the justices can allow more religious control of public schools, or they can respect the wishes of the Founding Fathers. They can’t do both.”
This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images
The person labeled as a sex worker by Gorsuch says more about him than I want to know.
Crazy!