Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, is getting called out online for completely misreading a book written for 5-year-olds.

Oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor were held this week. The case is about a group of parents who objected to so many parts of the curriculum at their Montgomery County, Maryland, schools that the school district revised its opt-out policy due to the “infeasibility of administering” all the opt-outs. The district decided to no longer allow parents to opt their kids out of parts of the curriculum. This led to the lawsuit, with some families saying that learning about LGBTQ+ people through books in the school violated their (the parents’) religious freedom.

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The parents objected to several books, but one in particular drew Alito’s attention: Uncle Bobby’s Wedding by Sarah Brannen. Brannen told Slate that the book was “written very simply, in language a 5-year-old can understand,” and yet somehow, Alito completely misread the plot.

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During oral arguments, attorney Eric Rassbach, who represented the parents, said that the book is objectionable to the parents because of the “mere exposure” of children to the idea of “two men getting married.”

Alito decided that Rassbach’s argument wasn’t good enough and that the book is doing more than just exposing kids to the fact that two people of the same sex can get married.

“I’ve read the book!” he said. “Do you think it’s fair to say that all that is done in Uncle Bobby’s Wedding is to expose children to the fact that there are men who marry other men?”

“I don’t think anybody can read that and say, well, this is just telling children that there are occasions when men marry other men, that Uncle Bobby gets married to his boyfriend, Jamie. And everybody’s happy and … everyone accepts this—except for the little girl, Chloe, who has reservations about it. But her mother corrects her: ‘No, you shouldn’t have any reservations about this.’ As I said, it has a clear moral message.”

That’s when Justice Sonia Sotomayor (appointed by President Barack Obama) jumped in because she, too, had read the picture book. But she understood the plot.

“Wait a minute,” she started. “The reservation is about-“

But Alito cut her off and continued his tirade. Several minutes later, Sotomayor was able to go back to her point while questioning Rassbach.

“The character, the child character, wasn’t objecting to same-sex marriage,” Sotomayor said. “She was objecting to the fact that marriage would take her uncle away from spending more time with her, correct?”

Rassbach said that he didn’t know and that the character in the book found it “hard to express what their actual concerns are.”

Sotomayor wasn’t going to let him get away with pretending like the children’s book was unclear on this point. She quoted the character Chloe saying, “He’ll have less time for me.”

“It seems self-evident, isn’t it?” Sotomayor asked, apparently the only adult lawyer in the room who was able to understand the book.

Alito later returned to discussing the book, saying that even though Sotomayor is right that Chloe was not chided by her mom for opposing same-sex marriage, the book still “subtly” tells kids that same-sex marriage “is a good thing.”

Brannen told Slate that Sotomayor correctly read her book: “No one in the book has any problem with same-sex marriage. Everyone in the story supports Bobby and Jamie’s decision to marry, including Chloe.”

Brannen said that she wondered if Alito was lying about having read the book, but then he quoted other parts of it during oral arguments, so she speculated about whether he was “being deliberately misleading.” Because the way he misread the book is significant when it comes to the legal arguments in the case: it’s one thing to say that a school can’t tell kids what view to have on a policy issue, like the legality of marriage equality, it’s another to say that a school can’t let kids know that LGBTQ+ people exist at all.

That is, if the book involved a child being chided for objecting to marriage equality, the parents could argue that it’s political propaganda. But no one in the book objects to marriage equality at all.

Brannen said that her book was actually about learning to deal with change and that same-sex marriage is presented as a normal part of life, an event that just happens to be the context for Chloe’s character growth. Alito didn’t seem to understand — either intentionally or not — that, for many Americans, same-sex couples getting married isn’t controversial at all and is just a part of life. Since same-sex couples have been allowed to marry throughout the United States for almost ten years now, same-sex weddings are just another thing that happens in America.

“This paranoid homophobia lies at the heart of the whole case,” Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern wrote. “The Republican-appointed justices made it abundantly clear that they think woke educators are inculcating children with radical, pro-LGBTQ+ values in violation of their parents’ religious beliefs. These justices sound eager to give parents a veto over classroom materials to prevent their children from learning about LGBTQ+ families. And they have zero concern for the profoundly stigmatizing message this censorship sends to children who belong to those very families.”

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