On June 27, the Supreme Court dropped two rulings that handed Christian conservatives exactly what they’ve been seeking: legal cover to disappear LGBTQ people from schools, libraries, and the internet.

If you’ve read Project 2025, or even read about it, then you know that these two cases—Mahmoud v. Taylor and Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton—aren’t unrelated, one-off decisions. They’re part of a larger project to reframe queer identity and sexual expression as obscenity. It was all outlined in Project 2025, the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s 900-page blueprint for turning the country into a theocratic cult.

Published in April 2023, just as Donald Trump was seeking a second presidency, Project 2025 is ambitious and dangerous. And the Court just gave that extremist project a bear hug.

The Court’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor is basically Project 2025 in judicial drag. I’ll explain.

In Mahmoud, a group of religious parents in Montgomery County, Maryland—Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian—objected to their kids reading LGBTQ -inclusive storybooks in elementary school. These books aren’t sexual or explicit in any way, and they aren’t controversial for anyone who believes in raising children to respect people’s differences. Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, Prince & Knight, and Pride Puppy! are age-appropriate books whose plotlines or characters simply acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ families.

For example, Pride Puppy! is an alphabet book that follows two queer parents, a baby, and their dog as they head to a Pride parade. When the puppy runs off, the community joins to help find it. During oral arguments in Mahmoud, Justice Neil Gorsuch announced that he’d read the book and that it features a sex worker and bondage. Ironically, it was Justice Amy Coney Barrett who broke it to Gorsuch that the character was a drag queen in a leather jacket—not a dominatrix, as he appeared to assume. (Jessica Pieklo and I interviewed the author of that book, Robin Stevenson, about the conservative ecosystem that has spread these vicious lies for an episode of Boom! Lawyered, which you can listen to here.)

At first, the Montgomery County Board of Education tried to accommodate these parents by giving them advance notice so they could pull their kids from classes featuring LGBTQ characters. The compromise proved unworkable. Attorneys for the parents later alleged in its application for Supreme Court review that “individual principals and teachers could not accommodate the growing number of opt out requests without causing........

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