The Supreme Court just approved anti-LGBT book bans.
On the last day of its term, America’s highest court gave legal backing to bigoted attempts to ban books and to erase queer people from public life.
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court ruled that Montgomery County in Maryland must alert parents and provide a means for children to opt out of hearing books that featuring gay and transgender characters.
The dissent from Justice Sotomayor is worth reading, as she makes clear that this is a broad and destructive ruling that “threatens the very essence of public education.” She makes the obvious connections that this will lead to more book bannings and more stigma:
Sotomayor, in dissent, correctly says that today's decision in Mahmoud will lead public schools to simply censor books featuring LGBTQ characters and themes, creating "chaos" and stigmatizing children with LGBTQ families. This decision will lead to book bans.www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p…
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) 2025-06-27T15:00:34.020Z
It’s simply not feasible for most schools to manage the logistics of providing opt-out spaces. It’s simpler to stop reading books the right could object to, which as Sotomayor writes, “hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices.”
To be clear, the books at the heart of this case are picture books like Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, about a gay character’s marriage, and Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, about a transgender kid. These are the things the right is working overtime to crush.
This case will no doubt be a boon to other attempts at book banning legislation. It’s bad, and this isn’t even addressing the Court’s other decisions today, which ended birthright citizenship and limited federal injunctions on executive orders.
The craven hypocrisy of all this no longer registers for the right. Republicans eagerly embrace censorship when it means they can force aside anything they don’t like, while cowering beneath the “freedom of the marketplace of ideas” when they are called out for their noxious beliefs. The right mocks safe spaces, while demanding their own at the expense of kids. They talk about “hardening classrooms for safety” by filling schools with weapons, while making classrooms actively hostile for any non-normative kid.
The right is savagely clear about who they are and what they want. Their cruelty is wielded without shame or restraint.
And Americans are clear about how they feel: we just witnessed some of the largest protests in American history against the Trump Administration and are seeing after poll after poll showing that people overwhelming hate this, all of it.
Will any Democratic politician take meaningful action? Will anyone stand up for kids, for queer people, for books? Concern about technical illegality or a speech hand-waving at the wrong process—the liberal equivalent of “thoughts and prayers”—isn’t enough. This isn’t an episode of The West Wing.
