As many Americans already apparently know, there are a lot of terrible people currently serving on the United States Supreme Court. But is Justice Samuel Alito the worst of the worst? Let’s examine the evidence.

On Monday, the court heard oral arguments for a case, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, about a website designer’s refusal to work on same-sex weddings. That designer, Lorie Smith, sued the state of Colorado in 2016 over its anti-discrimination laws, which she claimed violated her First Amendment right to refuse to work with same-sex couples. Not surprisingly, it appears that Alito—a staunch conservative who seemingly believes the only people who should have rights in America are the ones who had rights in the 1600s—thinks Smith should absolutely be able to deny service to individuals whose sexual orientation she doesn’t agree with. And while he didn’t just come out and say, “discrimination is good,” he did come close!

Earlier in the hearing, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had posed a hypothetical wherein she argued that Smith’s stance is no different from a photography studio refusing to photograph Black children for scenes meant to evoke old-timey Christmases past, when Black children wouldn’t have been allowed to pose in the white section of the mall. The point, obviously, was to show that such a scenario, like the one involving Smith and same-sex couples, is wrong. But Alito, who thinks he’s very clever, circled back to the Christmas hypothetical and claimed that, actually, such discrimination should be allowed because it would then mean Black Santas could say no to having to pose with kids in KKK robes, which he suggested is not currently the case.

“If there’s a Black Santa at the other end of the mall and he doesn’t want to have his picture taken with a child who’s dressed up in a Ku Klux Klan outfit, that Black Santa [can’t refuse] that?” Alito asked. In fact, Colorado solicitor general Eric Olson responded, that’s nota actually the case: a Black Santa can already refuse to pose with someone wearing a KKK outfit, since Ku Klux Klan outfits “are not protected characteristics under public accommodation laws,” while things like gender identity and sexual orientation are. Hence, why Smith’s refusal violates Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws, while Alito’s one with the Black Santa and KKK getups do not. Justice Elena Kagan then noted, for the right-wingers in the group, that Santa could refuse to pose with anyone wearing a KKK outfit, whether they were white, Black, or a member of any other protected group. To which Alito snarkily interjected, “You do see a lot of Black children in Ku Klux Klan outfits, right? All the time.” Later, he insisted on returning to the scenario that he clearly thought was a major owning of the libs. “Now back to my Black Santa example,” he said.

But it was arguably Alito’s earlier comments, wherein he joked that Kagan could be intimately familiar with a website that facilitates affairs, that put him in the running for Biggest Sleazebag on the Supreme Court. Bringing up another hypothetical scenario—in this case, one in which a Jewish person asks a photographer to take a photo for his JDate account—Alito described the website as “a dating service, I gather, for Jewish people.” Kagan, who is the sole Jewish justice on the court, then confirmed that her colleague was correct in his assessment, which drew laughter from the crowd. Fine, a nice little bit of collegial repartee. But then this happened:

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To be clear, that’s Alito joking that Kagan might know all about Ashley Madison, a website exclusively designed to help people in relationships cheat on their partners.

All of this comes, of course, just months after Alito authored the opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade, an opinion in which he approvingly cited the work of a 17th century jurist who supported marital rape and had women executed for “witchcraft.” Which he then followed up by telling stand-up jokes about having had taken away millions of people’s rights. Still, it’s hard to say, definitively, whether Alito is the worst of the worst when he’s got coworkers who think it’s fine for their unhinged spouses to try and get free and fair elections overturned; who reportedly belong to a secretive religious group that considers “women’s obedience and subservience to men as one of its central early teachings”; and have been accused of attempted rape (which they deny). But you could certainly argue that he is!

Bess Levin

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