Editors at National Review Online praise a ruling this week from rhe nation’s highest court.
The Supreme Court has ruled that Tennessee did not offend the Constitution by banning minors from being given puberty blockers and hormone therapy to change how they identify their gender. Wednesday’s 6–3 decision in United States v. Skrmetti, in an opinion delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, is a victory for basic reality and a defeat for judicial adventurism.
If all the justices followed the original meaning of the Constitution in this case, it would have been 9–0. But the Court did not even need to get that far. The esoteric theory of sex discrimination advanced against the Tennessee law was that it discriminated by allowing the same hormones to be used for entirely different treatments, such as “to treat a minor’s congenital defect, precocious (or early) puberty, disease, or physical injury.” But as Roberts noted, this theory ignored “a key aspect of any medical treatment: the underlying medical concern the treatment is intended to address.” Because “different drugs can be used to treat the same thing . . . for the term ‘medical treatment’ to make sense . . . it must necessarily encompass both a given drug and the specific indication for which it is being administered.” At that, the theory once backed by Joe Biden’s Justice Department evaporated.
Hard cases make bad law; easy cases make bad dissents. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the other two liberals, brought the melodrama: “The Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims. In sadness, I dissent.” Democracy is not a political whim. As Justice Clarence Thomas rejoined to Sotomayor’s effort to muster a medical consensus on her side, “the American people and their representatives are entitled to disagree with those who hold themselves out as experts,” especially on questions of ethics. Even if the current elite American fad for transgender treatments were not built on shifting scientific sands, it would still be the right of the people to decide that irreversible medical treatments on minors are unethical because they are not old enough to give their own informed consent.
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Author: Mitch Kokai
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