Developing Little Bigots

There are many ways to make other people feel unwelcome. Among the most effective is to leave the room every time they enter. This is what the conservative - reactionary - justices on the Supreme Court encouraged last week.

The Court ruled in favor of a group of Maryland parents who sued for the right to remove their elementary school children whenever any LGBTQ+ or LGBTQ+ adjacent subject matter entered the classroom.

The majority ruling was anchored in the right to religious “expression.” In this and other cases, from hairdressing, wedding planning to cake-making, the religious “expression” seems to be “fuck you!”

Critics of the ruling, including the eloquently dissenting liberal justices, worried, with justification, that the Alito crowd had opened the door to endless opt outs when classroom materials or discussions violate parents’ beliefs.

One can imagine any number of curriculum items, including evolution, that violate the beliefs of someone’s religion.

In this case, Alito opined, LGBTQ+ presence in any form “. . . substantially interferes with the religious development of their children . . .”

The corrupt and chronically bitter Clarence Thomas complained about “. . . the inclusion of the storybooks” and the “exclusion of traditional religious views. . .”

This is not the first time that Thomas constructed a remarkably stupid false equivalence. Storybooks about other humans don’t violate the establishment clause. Teaching traditional religious views in public schools is a blatant violation, although to be fair, blatant violations are a daily affair in the form of “Under God” in the pledge and “In God We Trust” on kids’ lunch money.

The very Christian conservative justices are perplexed why anyone would fail to see the impeccable logic in service of their inerrant beliefs. These Christians and so many others see their beliefs as incontrovertible and see themselves as oh-so-tolerant when begrudgingly acknowledging that non-believers have any rights at all in their country.

The opt-out precedent established is worrying, but trivial compared to the consequences on children and their families.

Imagine the inner experience of a child of same-sex parents when a group of those “religiously developing” children are removed from the classroom when a family that looks like their own is offered in a book or discussion. How disgusting must they be! Their classmates must be shielded from the kind of people they love.

How sad might a child be if already feeling vague stirrings of affection for another child of the same gender? For how long will such a child’s love feelings be clouded by the implicit scorn of their judgmental peers? If this does not strike you as a real issue, you have forgotten what it is to be a child.

Alito thinks Uncle Bobby’s Wedding and Pride Puppy, about a puppy lost during a pride parade, substantially interfere with childrens’ religious development. Some religion that.

And how about the ones whose religious development includes teachings that those books - those people - are so dangerous to their well-being that they can’t go to school? Imagine their future ingrained bigotry. And imagine the deep, perhaps lifelong, conflict they will feel if they are among the estimated 10 percent of humans who eventually find their real selves with a love partner of the same gender.

The other opt-out concerns are real, but relatively trivial. A bunch of kids absent when evolution is taught - or glancingly noted - would only have other kids scratching their heads in bemusement. “What the heck is wrong with them? Who cares if they or their parents don’t believe in evolution? Their loss.”

But this is different. After decades of uneven progress for our LGBTQ+ community, the momentum is in reverse gear and accelerating. In Erie, the town where I live, the Pride Flag became a hot-button issue this year. Most observers think the faithful justices in the majority are just waiting for a well-funded litigant to bring a case that will allow them to whittle down or erase the right to same-sex marriage. Crimes against our LGBTQ+ friends and neighbors have risen for four straight years. LGBTQ+ folks are nine times more likely to be targets of hate crimes.

The “religious development”Alito cherishes is inculcating bigotry not faith, hate not love.

The multicultural community earned through decades of legal and political work is being dismantled at a furious and infuriating rate.

That is precisely what Alito, Thomas and the other conservative justices want.