KBJ’s Vacuous Remarks During Transgender Case Arguments Would Be Funny If Justices Didn’t Have Lifetime Appointments
“She says that NOT cutting a gender-confused childs genitals off is the same as banning interracial marriages.”
Americans were amazed during then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearing when she could not or rather, would not, answer Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s (R-TN) simple question: What is a woman?
Brown Jackson replied, “No. I can’t.”
Blackburn pressed, “You can’t?”
The nominee said, “Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.”
This is a simple question that requires a simple answer.
It’s a major red flag that a Supreme Court nominee backed by the far left refuses to define the word “woman.” https://t.co/5IjhmmshG9
— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) March 23, 2022
KBJ came dangerously close to that level of vacuity on Wednesday during oral arguments in the case of United States v. Skrmetti. The question before the Court is whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1 (SB1), which prohibits gender-transition treatments for minors, “violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that laws prohibiting such treatments constitute “sex discrimination” because a minor’s gender is a determining factor in accessing specific medical care for transitioning.
Brown Jackson took things even further, suggesting parallels between this case and Loving v. Virginia, a 1967 case that struck down laws banning interracial marriage.
She continued:
I’m thinking in particular about Loving v. Virginia, and I’m wondering whether you thought about the parallels, because I see one as to how this statute operates and how the anti-miscegenation statutes in Virginia operated.
…
The question was whether it was discriminatory because it applied to both races and it wasn’t necessarily invidious. … But, as I read the case here, the court starts off by saying that Virginia is now one of 16 states that prohibit and punish marriages on the basis of racial classifications. And when you look at the structure of that law, you know you can’t do something that is inconsistent with your own characteristics is sort of the same thing.
So, it’s interesting to me that we now have this different argument and I wonder whether Virginia could have gotten away with what they did here by just making a classification argument the way that Tennessee is in this case.
…
I mean, these laws, the law here [SB1] operates in the same way. The question of can you marry this other person depended upon what your race was. You could marry the other person if it was the same, consistent with your race. … If you couldn’t, I take your law to be doing basically the same thing.
Tennessee Solicitor General J. Matthew Rice replied, “Giving testosterone to a boy with a deficiency is not the same treatment as giving it to a girl who has psychological distress associated with her body.”
Prelogar responded, “Yes, I think there is absolutely a parallel between any law that says you can’t act inconsistent with the protected characteristic. … ”
[Full oral arguments can be viewed on C-SPAN.]
Brown Jackson and Prelogar may be the only two individuals who equate allowing a minor (who more often than not is simply a confused adolescent who is likely to change their mind) to undergo irreversible medical treatments, to Virginia lawmakers who wanted to ban interracial marriage in the 1960s.
It was a remarkable statement for anyone to make. But, coming from an associate justice of the Supreme Court, it was alarming.
Ketanji Brown Jackson just compared bans on sex changes for kids to bans on interracial marriage. pic.twitter.com/XOOZRLOI2N
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 4, 2024
Reactions to Brown Jackson’s “legal analysis” were not kind.
Yes, because banning a white person from marrying a black person is the same thing as cutting off a 10-year-old’s gen*tals.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 4, 2024
Give her a break, Collin, she isn’t a biologist.
— Burt Macklin (@BurtMaclin_FBI) December 4, 2024
No, it’s even worse:
She says that NOT cutting a gender-confused childs genitals off is the same as banning interracial marriages.— KlarnameNeeWa (@WTFNeinDanke) December 4, 2024
RedState’s Jeff Charles summed up KBJ’s profoundly stupid remarks best of all: He wrote: “It’s only funny until you remember that these nutjobs have lifetime appointments on the highest court in the land.”
Sonia Sotomayor: "Using 'gender-affirming care on children is like taking aspirin!"
Ketanji Brown Jackson: "If you want to ban 'gender-affirming care' for kids, then you're like people who wanted to ban interracial marriage."
It's only funny until you remember that these… pic.twitter.com/ilbJuSZHjz
— Jeff Charles, Doni's St. Bernard🏴 (@jeffcharlesjr) December 4, 2024
Brown Jackson needs to recognize that the cultural landscape is shifting. Under the Biden administration, the pendulum swung as far to the left as it possibly could. This demanded that even the most extreme views on race and social justice be entertained. However, last month’s election sent a clear message: voters are rejecting “woke” policies in favor of fairness and justice.
Those who continue to focus on divisive issues like pronouns or advocating for transgender participation in women’s sports risk being left behind in this changing climate.
Unfortunately, as Charles pointed out, Brown Jackson and her like-minded colleague, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor—who compared the risks of transgender treatments to taking aspirin on Wednesday—are appointed for life.
At the Supreme Court hearing on whether it is illegal to ban the medical transition of minors, liberal Justice Sotomayor interrupts the TN lawyer when he explains the health dangers. She says there are always risks to medicine, like taking aspirin. pic.twitter.com/f9HdyBe7d4
— Andy Ngo 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) December 4, 2024
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Court jester to DEI for.
Can Ketanji Brown Jackson be impeached for stupidity? She is not qualified and should removed like other DEI duds.
And, she’s a two-fer. Black and with indoor plumbing.
Thomas can NEVER retire
But he will die. So maybe he will have to retire so he is not our very on RBG.
She is an ideologue. Rational arguments are never needed nor have to be understood by her.
If it makes you feel any better, she’s only saying such stupid things to stay on the good side of the zampolit.
If it wasn’t for Donald Trump we would have 3 more people like her on the Supreme Court.
And for all the hate directed at him Mitch McConnell is also responsible for this. In fact him not letting Garland on the court likely helped get Trump elected.
Did I miss McConnell winning a presidential election? And we’re to give him credit for doing what any Republican should do in that position?
No, it wasn’t what any Republican would do. It was a very brave stance he took, and he deserves full credit for it.
Should do, not would do, pretend lawyer.
Your idea of what someone “should” do is not the standard by which anyone is to be judged. People are judged in comparison to what anyone else in their position would have done. And most people in McConnell’s position would not have acted as he did, holding the line for an entire year, against all the pressure that was exerted against him, in order to save the spot for a Republican president — even when it turned out that the only potential such president was someone he didn’t approve of.
DEI (Didn’t Earn It) appointment.
Also sotomayer.
It’s a shame she couldn’t have pointed us to one of those wise Latinas she talked about.
Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing was straight up kabuki theater.
I think it is has been and will always be time to change the ways our Court system is built. I believe some form of Missouri Plan would build a better more functioning court, with both more represenation and an ability for the public to retain or reject juidicial officers.
No. Absolutely not. Allowing “experts” to act as unelected gatekeepers, keeping out anyone they don’t approve, is exactly what the Deep State is about. It’s what the Progressive movement of 100 years ago was about. It’s what C.S. Lewis warned us about in That Hideous Strength.
It’s rather like the way Iranian elections work, with a panel of mullahs vetting candidates before they can appear on the ballot, so that the voters only ever get a choice between candidates who are cut from more or less the same cloth.
So, I’m just going to come out and say it. The RINO’s voted with the Progressives to put this retard DEI on the bench. This is why America put Trump in office.
Women think in household management terms: equal division, caring, taking care of. Man think in structural stability terms, better suited to managing a large system with different incentives.
So they’re not morons exactly, just doing what women do, but without much introspection about its appropriateness for the task.
That they buy into the idea that people can change their sex spontaneously simply because they believe means they’re freaking retards
It was been a mental disorder for many years but now it is a right. The way it is presented, why can’t someone become anything they want? Why can’t an 18-year-old kid be 21 to be booze? Why can’t a straight man say he is a woman and go into the women’s showers? Oh wait, they can. If Sotomayor had a son he could ask her, “Mom, can I have an aspirin or have my penis cut off because I don’t feel well?”. Our country is going through a period of insanity and history will show it as a terrible time for sane people.
We can pity the people that actually suffer from this disorder. But what do you do about the people that enable them instead of helping them?
It would be easier on the fake-minorities. For example, they could just identify as indigenous and skip the unsourced grandma story.
You clearly do not know any women. And you obviously don’t know any of the millions of men who think only in emotional terms..
Its apparent you hardly know or associate with anyone in real life, and your biases are both deep and ugly. You espouse them constantly and inappropriately. They are obsessions.
Anyone who makes decision or deductions based on unexamined racial or sexual obsessions can hardly be said to be rational.
In a sane world she would recuse herself since she apparently doesn’t know what a woman is anyways.
That would not be grounds for recusal. Nothing in this case depends on knowing what a man or a women are. Tennessee’s whole point is that its law takes no account whatsoever of sex. No one is being prevented from doing anything that they would be allowed to if they were the opposite sex. So sex (in the sense of “gender”) is completely irrelevant here, and therefore there’s no need to know anything about it.
It’s not like she gave it some thought and this is what she came up with.
This is a woman who took an oath: “I do solemnly swear that everything’s about race, my own race and nothing but race, race, race all the time, so help me.”
It’s not as stupid as it sounds, and she’s not completely wrong to draw a parallel with Loving. She’s not directly comparing the cases, she’s abstracting the principles that were argued in Loving and trying to apply them here. That’s what judges are supposed to do. That’s what judging is. She’s doing it wrong here, but the general idea is correct.
Loving is very relevant to the general topic of how we treat trans-whatevers. But it’s not relevant in this particular case. She’s thinking of the whole category of trans-related cases, and not seeing that this case is different.
Loving is relevant, because one argument commonly made in trans-related cases is that we’re not discriminating by sex, because we are treating everyone the same. Both sexes are subject to the same rule, that they must behave in a manner appropriate to their sex. E.g. everyone, male and female, must wear the clothing appropriate to their sex, or must use the restroom assigned to their sex, or may only marry someone of the opposite sex. Men may not wear dresses and women may not wear trousers, men may not use the Ladies’ and women may not use the Gents’, men may only marry women and women may only marry men, so they’re being treated equally.
And the answer to that is that Loving considered and rejected this argument. The claim in that case was that anti-miscegenation laws treat everyone equally. Everyone may only marry someone of the same race. White people may only marry white people, black people may only marry black people, etc., so there is no discrimination on the grounds of race. That is obviously the same argument as that for men may only marry women and vice versa. So to accept it we must reverse Loving and no one wants to do that. There are some good counterarguments, but it is a serious point and a valid comparison.
But as I explained in a comment to the previous post on this case, none of that is applicable here. No girl is being told that she can’t be treated with a drug that she could have had if she were a boy, or vice versa. We are talking about the same drugs, the same treatment, though its implementation may differ depending on the patient. And we’re saying no minor may receive this treatment unless they have a genuine medical condition for which it is indicated. Boys and girls are being treated exactly equally.
It would be different if we were talking about separate drugs, and the one that trans-boys (i.e. girls who want to be boys) want were readily available to actual boys, while the one that trans-girls want were readily available to actual girls. In that case Loving would be directly on point. “If I were a boy I could have that drug, but you won’t let me have it just because I’m a girl”. They tried making that argument, but it fails, because boys can’t get the drug in question either, unless they have a medical condition that requires it, and the same is true for girls. If you have a medical condition that requires it you can get it, if not not.
If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle them with bullsh*t. QED
I heard that discussion at SCOTUS and agree with this analysis. At first I thought it was nuts, but when I thought about I realized she had a point, but not about the case at hand, pretty much just as you described.
No one can be “gender-confused”. There is no such thing as “gender-affirming care”.
Until we stop implicitly agreeing to play in the Orwellian sandbox and refuse to mis-use language this way — and this includes well-meaning judges and lawyers — the insanity will continue.
People simply do not HAVE “genders”: http://www.thelizlibrary.org/liz/liznotes-people-dont-have-genders.html
She always will be a Cultural Marxist
I suspect that if given the chance, her Marxism wouldn’t be limited to culture.
I missed it, when did being African-American become a mental disorder?
Sometimes a legal argument should be put aside by judges who understand that the ends being pursued are sadistic.
we’re talking about children / minors–what has race got to do with it ?–in a sane world, a parent’s / guardian’s consent is required for the administration of anesthesia / oral surgery / certain other procedures–regardless, the patients are children not adults–they can’t marry, vote, own certain types of property, etc. and are expected (already) to require adult consent (excepting emergency procedures) for any type of surgery / medical procedure to be performed–” transition ” nonsense is hardly in the realm of trauma / emergency surgery
race has nothing to do with it despite jackson’s twisted comparison–it’s about protecting children / minors from genuine life-altering procedures performed on minors / children on some adolescent ” whim ”
as adults, it is our responsibility / duty to protect children / minors against potential harm and, as is the case here, against, the well-organized transition ” industry ” who seek to profit from unethical practices foisted on minors and children
jackson’s reference to interracial marriage as a comparison is both inappropriate and a transparent validation of her racist bias towards everything in this life
You have fundamentally misunderstood the entire topic. We are not talking about minors making their own decisions, we are talking about medical treatment of minors with their parents’ consent.
Nor are we talking about surgery of any kind.
Tennessee has banned doctors from treating children with certain drugs, even with their parents’ consent, unless there is a genuine medical condition requiring them. The reason is that there is very good reason to believe these drugs are very harmful to children, and little reason to believe they do enough good to outweigh that harm, or even any good at all. Tennessee has made the decision that this harm is serious enough to justify overriding the wishes of the patient, the parents, and the doctor. And a majority of SCOTUS appears to agree that this is a decision for the legislature to make.
Many states have already made such a decision about the surgical mutilation of girls’ genitals. Congress tried banning it too, but that was unconstitutional because no interstate market exists for such surgery, and protecting children from such harm is not one of Congress’s enumerated powers. But that’s not a problem for state legislatures, and I don’t recall anyone challenging such laws in those states that have them.
I can see this taken to an extreme, where a state might ban all surgery or medical intervention on children without a medical necessity, and thus ban even such procedures as ear piercing or circumcision. That would be bad. But in this case the evidence is heavily on Tennessee’s side.
Why does it seem that the democrats always seem to advocate for the most extreme, most divisive points of view?
It’s almost as if they’re purposefully trying to tear the country apart.
If these children’s parents had to pay out-of-pocket for surgeries and lifetime medications, and lifetime doctor appointments, and lifetime mri’s, etc., how much of this would still be happening?
But we pay for it.
If the American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association and the Boards of Medicine and the Hospital Surgical and Endocrine groups were prevented from receiving huge payments and laundered funds from Pharma, how much of this would be happening?
But we continue to pay for it.
Cutting out body parts from healthy people seems like a bad idea to the vast majority. At best the practice must be restricted to Adults and classified as a cosmetic procedure that no insurance provider is required to pay for. If some adult wants to mutilate themselves and legitimate 3rd party professionals without any financial stake will sign off on the recommendation of a Psychologist who has treated and evaluated this person for one year….and the person can afford to pay for the procedure…it ain’t my cup of tea but to each their own.
This isn’t about surgery, it’s about drugs. Drugs whose proponents claim are harmless, but the evidence is very much against them.
And it’s about children whose doctor and parents agree they should get the drugs; it’s the state that’s saying hang on, this can cause you major damage, you have no genuine medical need for it, and there’s no real evidence of any benefit, or at least of a benefit great enough to outweigh the harm, so we’re not going to allow you to do it. When you’re older you’ll thank us.
maybe she misunderestimated the issue.