This is a stunning exchange, not because of the briefing from the Florida Supreme Court, but because of how poorly Bostock has been received. I don’t know if there is any decision in recent Supreme Court history that has aged worse than Bostock. As a matter of substance, the Court has walked back the ruling in Mahmoud and Mirabelli, and will walk it back further in Chiles and the Title IX cases. As a matter of doctrine, not a single conservative would hold up Bostock as the proper way of doing textualism. The pirate flag of textualism barely flutters.
At this point, Bostock has become a laughingstock, so much so that a conservative judge asks a conservative litigant to disavow a Supreme Court precedent on how to read statutes. Of course, that ruling is not binding on the Florida Supreme Court. It is a fun academic question whether the Supreme Court can even set a precedent of how to engage in originalism or textualism. (Tara Grove suggests that the Court lacks the power to impose any methodology.) But I couldn’t help but chuckle at this exchange to see how Bostock fares in the real world.
It was not Gorsuch’s finest hour.