Six Supreme Court justices misread my children's book, the author says

Justice Sotomayor called out the conservative supermajority for botching the message of "Uncle Bobby's Wedding." So did its author, in an interview with All Rise News.

Hey Meidas Mighty — it’s Ben Meiselas, co-founder of the MeidasTouch Network.

This one really hit me.

Adam Klasfeld, one of the most respected legal reporters in the country and founder of All Rise News, takes a deep dive into a Supreme Court ruling that turns a heartwarming children’s book—Uncle Bobby’s Wedding—into a flashpoint in the culture wars.

The book’s author, Sarah S. Brannen, speaks directly to Adam and MeidasTouch in a moving interview that reveals just how far the majority opinion stretched to twist the book’s meaning.

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By Adam Klasfeld

The children’s book “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” is 32 pages long — shorter if you don’t count the title page and cover. Its author Sarah S. Brannen wrote the picture book for children between the ages of 4 and 7, making it appropriate for students at a kindergarten reading level.

Yet six Supreme Court justices apparently misconstrued its meaning.

That’s according to dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor — backed up by the author herself in an interview with All Rise News.

Justice Samuel Alito and his conservative peers suggested that the book’s young girl Chloe might be uncomfortable with her Uncle Bobby getting married because his longtime boyfriend Jamie is a man, but Brannen says that’s false.

“I always said that the book would be identical if Bobby were marrying a woman named Jamie,” Brannen said in a phone interview hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling. “The story is about a family. The fact that the men are gay is not what the book is about. It’s part of the fabric of the big, wide, diverse country that we live in.”

The majority’s “creative reading“

“Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” was one of five LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks that religious parents successfully sued to keep their children from having to read in public school curricula in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor.

As the six-justice supermajority had it, the book was “coy about the precise reason” why Chloe was uncomfortable about her Uncle Bobby’s wedding.

Sotomayor scathingly corrected the conservative justices in a footnote.

“With respect, the reason is plainly stated in the book and has nothing to do with the gender of anyone involved,” she wrote.

In the book, Chloe tells her favorite uncle, “I don’t think you should get married” because his marriage might stand in the way of the two of them “having fun together like always.”

Uncle Bobby promises that they will “still have fun together” — and proves it by taking Chloe to the ballet, the beach, and out camping, along with his fiancé Jamie.

Sotomayor skewered the majority for characterizing their “creative reading” of the book as “subtle.”

“The right word, instead, might be ‘imagined,’” she wrote.

Letting readers make up their minds for themselves, Sotomayor reproduced the book in full in an appendix of her dissent.

“We get good reviews and bad reviews”

Sotomayor and Alito had fought about the book’s interpretation during oral arguments, long before the release of the ruling.

“It seems like [Alito] really doesn't like my book, and [Sotomayor] seems to think it's great,” Brannen said. “People have different opinions about different books. We get good reviews and bad reviews.”

Uncommonly for children’s books, this one sparked a lawsuit and a Supreme Court opinion setting back LGBTQ rights under the banner of religious freedom. Brannen recalled writing this one two decades ago, when Massachusetts first legalized same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court did in Obergefell.

“I knew there were very few LGBTQ picture books for young children,” she said.

But she said that the true inspiration for the book was her then-seven-year-old niece, who believed that every book should end with a wedding.

Brennan said that the authors of the books at issue in the lawsuit started a group chat over the course of the litigation, and the setback that the ruling represents for LGBTQ children and families has been '“distressing.”

“Children need to see families like theirs in books,” she said. “They want to, and it's very important that they see families that are different from theirs as well.”

The Supreme Court’s injunction forces a Maryland county school board to notify parents who filed the lawsuit if Brennan’s book, and the others at issue in the case, will be used for instruction — and let their children opt out for the remainder of the litigation.

In the first paragraph of her dissent, Sotomayor lamented the message that the ruling conveyed.

“Public schools, this Court has said, are ‘at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny,’” she wrote. “They offer to children of all faiths and backgrounds an education and an opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society. That experience is critical to our Nation’s civic vitality. Yet it will become a mere memory if children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs.”

For more from Adam Klasfeld, subscribe to All Rise News here.