We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.
The Supreme Court hearing in United States v. Skrmetti featured several highlights. As framed by the Biden administration, the case raised the question:
Whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1 (SB1), which prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity,” Tenn. Code Ann. § 68-33-103(a)(1), violates the Equal Protection Clause
of the Fourteenth Amendment.
I have posted audio of the hearing below via C-SPAN. The filings with the Court in the case are posted here. The Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium has a good account here.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor demonstrated in once again that she is not a wise Latina woman. Rather, she is an idiot. Cutting off genitals may entail risks, but all medical procedures have risks. Even taking aspirin. More here (with video clip). Tell it, sister!
I hesitate to say the same of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, but at her confirmation hearing she couldn’t tell the Senate Judiciary Committee what a woman is. The question stumped her.
Yesterday it wasn’t what she purported not to know that made one wonder. It was what she purported to fear. Referring to the law banning interracial marriage that was held unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia, Justice Jackson said she was “getting kind of nervous.” She professed to be “worried that we’re undermining the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases.” She “wonder[ed] whether Virginia could have gotten away with what they did” if state officials then had made an argument similar to the one made on behalf of Tennessee’s law yesterday. More here.
As for the Court’s leftwing flank, one might adapt a thought from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. Thus does the left’s evolving orthodoxy make idiots of them all.
Elizabeth Prelogar is the Solicitor General. She opened the argument against the Tennessee law for the Biden administration. The Court expects the highest standard of professionalism from the office of Solicitor General. Justice Alito had a bone to pick with Prelogar regarding her representations to the Court in this case. More here.
It’s difficult to keep up with the demands of the left’s evolving orthodoxy. Susannah Luthi reports today in an excellent Free Beacon story that Oregon is poised to force health insurers to cover trans genital surgeries for children or risk losing their state licenses. The proposed rule relies on the latest standards of care developed by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Luthi’s story makes for a good companion to the oral argument in Skrmetti.