SUPREME COURT REDEFINES SEX; THREATENS FREEDOM OF RELIGION
When words don’t mean anything, rights don’t mean anything.
BY DANIEL GREENFIELD
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
When peaceful protests injure hundreds and destroy entire neighborhoods, and the coronavirus infects protesters depending on the cause they’re protesting for, words don’t mean very much.
And reality itself is under siege in the minds of the men and women who run the country.
A Southern Democrat segregationist inserted “sex” into the Civil Rights Act as a poison pill.
Rep. Howard Smith had introduced what eventually became Title VII, with a letter which asked, that since there were more women than men, "why the Creator would set up such an imbalance of spinsters, shutting off the 'right' of every female to have a husband of her own, is, of course, known only to nature... but I am sure you will agree that this is a grave injustice to womankind and something the Congress and President Johnson should take immediate steps to correct... especially in this election year."
To add to the already hilarious joke, six Supreme Court justices just decided that what the Southern racist really meant by “sex” was gay and transgender because in Washington D.C. no joke is too funny that it can’t be taken seriously as a basis for judicial activism and lawsuits.
It’s still a joke, but we’re not allowed to laugh anymore.
"Few in 1964 would have expected Title VII to apply to discrimination against homosexual and transgender persons. But legislative history has no bearing here," Gorsuch writes.
If the actual purpose and meaning of the law doesn’t matter, then what does?
What Gorsuch, Roberts and his leftist colleagues believe matters. Nothing else. Rights are as imaginary as gender and legislative history gets in the way of legislating from the bench.
The Gorsuch decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia finding that “sex” in Title VII covers any group having anything to do with sex in a trendy way has been described as “textual”. It’s only textual if you think the text of legislation should be read through a contemporary definition rather than the definition of the time. When President Taft’s wife was discussing their “gay season”, it didn’t mean gay any more than “sex” does. Except maybe according to Gorsuch.
But words can mean anything and nobody cares about facts anyway.
Gerald Bostock, who is at the center of this Supreme Court precedent, claims that he was fired for being gay while Clayton County claimed that the child welfare services coordinator had spent money meant for Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) at Cowtippers and F.R.O.G.S.: a cantina in Atlanta. Cowtippers does not appear in Gorsuch’s decision though it seems more germane to the question than the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water, which does.
The Gorsuch judicial activist revision of Smith’s legislation is bad news for those organizations protected by that piece of paper known as the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
"Compelling a religious organization to employ individuals whose conduct flouts the tenets of the organization’s faith forces the group to communicate an objectionable message," Justice Alito notes, paraphrasing these groups.
But these days there’s a new faith in town and people are being fired left and right for flouting it. If you run afoul of social justice mobs, your job will be gone because the company that employs you will blame you for “communicating an objectionable message”. Like the worth of all lives.
There’s a new heresy in town and the social justice inquisition is always waiting. The essential premise of that faith is that everyone must be made to kneel to it or lose their heads.
“These questions are going to create a tsunami of new litigation and create a huge amount of uncertainty going forward," Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, cautioned.
"Can a Catholic school deny employment to a teacher whose sexual lifestyle blatantly flouts millennia of Catholic moral teaching? Can an Orthodox Jewish day school refuse to hire a male teacher who self-identifies as a woman, contravening traditional teaching rooted in Genesis?" Josh Hammer, Of Counsel at the First Liberty Institute, asked.
The answer is obvious and the lawsuits are inevitable. And thus Smith’s old joke translates into the effective criminalization of traditional religious morality at the institutional level. That’s the problem with writing jokes into legislation, they end up packing a hell of a punchline.
The Gorsuch decision has put the Bible on the same level as the code of the Klu Klax Klan and that great legislator’s response to the First Amendment question is that it will be settled in future cases. There’s little doubt that it will, and on the terms of Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia.
Our constitutional legacy, like our religious foundations, is based on the belief that words matter. Judicial activism is based on the opposite belief that words can and do mean anything.
"Legislators actually won’t know what they are voting to pass—because words might change cultural meaning dramatically between the time of passage and some future court case," Russell Moore, of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, warns.
When words mean nothing, rights mean nothing. Rights derive not from foundational documents grounded in eternal truths, but from social trends and the whims of political appointees.
Bill Clinton had famously debated the meaning of “is” and of sex. Gorsuch and his five accomplices claim that they’ve settled the question of “sex”. Now comes the battle over defining “religion” and the “free exercise” of it. Are teachers in religious schools exempted? What about bookkeepers? Civil rights has long since become a zero sum game with winners and losers.
The winners advance to the next stage of suing people and the losers retreat to defending them.
Religious organizations will be forced to defend the religious role of teachers. And, once that battle is lost, the religious role of rabbis and ministers. Then they’ll be told to ‘bake the cake’.
The larger question, the one that Gorsuch so casually loses sight of in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, is where do rights come from. The Declaration of Independence had a compelling answer to that question that enabled Americans to defy the will of a king.
“All men are created equal,” wrote a long-dead Virginian whose statues are being toppled, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Equality was not in contradiction with religion, but derived from it. Our common origin as children of G-d made us equal. The whim of a court or any human ruler could not make or unmake our equality.
Contemporary judicial activism has pitted religion against equality and we are less equal for it.
Judicial activism began by taking away the equality of Natural Law and replacing it with the inequality of judicial whim which inevitably nullifies whatever good it sets out to create.
Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia reinvents the meaning of sex, based on the deeply serious work of a Dixiecrat trying to make a joke of the Civil Rights Act, while treating the First Amendment, that is the work of our Founding Fathers, as an awkward footnote. Title VII requires treating Rep. Howard Smith’s joke more seriously than the work of James Madison, and then dismissing Smith as irrelevant to the question of what sex was meant to mean.
What then is this whole thing based on beyond the prejudices of 6 contemporary justices?
As the crank said to William James, “it’s turtles all the way down.”
“Some of those who supported adding language to Title VII to ban sex discrimination may have hoped it would derail the entire Civil Rights Act. Yet, contrary to those intentions, the bill became law. Since then, Title VII’s effects have unfolded with far-reaching consequences, some likely beyond what many in Congress or elsewhere expected,” Gorsuch's opinion concedes.
Take Title VII, which was blown up out of a segregationist’s joke into the ultimate expression of protecting women as a “sex” against discrimination, which now eliminates womanhood.
As Justice Alito notes, “The effect of the Court’s reasoning may be to force young women to compete against students who have a very significant biological advantage, including students who have the size and strength of a male.”
That’s far-reaching alright compared to Smith giggling about an entitlement to husbands. Some half a century later we live in a strange new world in which the dominant elite consensus is that women don’t exist except as a set of outfits, injectable hormones and a state of mind. The most popular children’s author in the world is under attack for asserting that women really do exist.
Our elites used to mock Galileo's interrogators only to deny the existence of something far more real and obvious than the motions of planetary bodies. And the Supreme Court is on board.
Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia continues the process of ushering in a world in which rights are as fluid as the definitions of words and the shifting nature of ideas in a society going mad.
Title VII helped make womens’ sports, now it will help unmake them. If words don’t mean anything, neither do rights. And rights then unmake themselves. Jokes have nasty punchlines.
Smith’s joke continues to resound long after his death by not merely wiping out the Civil Rights Act, but the entire Bill of Rights. That old segregationist’s joke is now set to destroy, as Alito pointed out, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech and women’s rights.
The joke hath given. Now it taketh everything away.
Civil rights have come so far that women and religion both have to defend their right to exist.
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Analysis: The US Supreme Court ruling on Bostock v Clayton County: What you need to know about it – and what we must do now.
SEE: https://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen4/20b/Analysis-Supreme-Court-ruling/index.html;
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:Bizarre ruling changes legal meaning of "sex" in Civil Rights law to include LGBT behaviors. Far-reaching effects beyond just employment.
Yes: We need to start actually resisting. This ruling is not law.
June 17, 2020
“To restate what was once self-evident to everyone, including most homosexuals themselves: men using one another as women constitutes a perversion. To my unreconstructed mind, this is as true as ever; and so far as I am concerned, it would still be true even if gay sex no longer entailed the danger of infection and even if everything about it were legalized by all 50 states and ratified by all nine Justices of the Supreme Court.”
- Norman Podhoretz, Commentary Magazine, November 1996
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sex, among other things. Yesterday, in Bostock v Clayton County the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that “sex” also includes homosexuality (“sexual orientation”) and transgenderism (“gender identity”). Thus, all companies must now allow openly homosexual or transgender employees – and can be sued for “discrimination” if the employees don’t receive the treatment they claim is their right. There are no “religious exemptions.”
What does this mean to citizens?
This ruling will create a storm of employment lawsuits. But make no mistake: It will soon go far beyond employment. The absurd legal redefinition of the word “sex” to include LGBT behaviors by the US Supreme Court will soon be used to legally force that horrific agenda into every realm of society (including, of course, transgender athletics, and restrooms).
Ruling took everyone by surprise
This ruling took virtually everyone by surprise. The case seemed like an easy decision about what “sex” means. No one seriously thought the US Supreme Court would go this far. It was similar to the 2003 “gay marriage” ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court – which even the “gays” didn’t expect.
Moreover, on three occasions since 2007, Congress has considered adding “sexual orientation” to federal non-discrimination laws. But no bill has passed both houses. So instead, the Supreme Court, in true activist fashion, has decided to ignore the separation of powers and act on its own.
How did our legal system get to this point?
If we honestly look at this ruling from its logical beginning, it shouldn’t be too surprising that we’ve reached this point. This is only the latest phase in the left-leaning government officials’ re-shaping the Constitution for their own social-justice ends.
Let’s start with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is the focus of this ruling. Though well intentioned, it was clearly unconstitutional, as various prominent members of Congress explained at the time. For example, Senator Barry Goldwater was sympathetic to the aim of the bill. He was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP and helped integrate the Phoenix public schools and the Arizona National Guard. But he voted against it.
Goldwater (and others) insisted that according to the Tenth Amendment, the federal government has no legal right to interfere with whom people hired or fired or to whom they sold their products. That “power” lay with the states, and with the people. From a constitutional standpoint he was correct. But the emotional momentum of the time was in the other direction.
Originally, the word “sex” was not even in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It was added to the bill near the end of debate as a “poison pill” by Southern Dixie Democrats. They hoped that including “discrimination based on sex” would make the bill offensive to most legislators and get it killed. But that didn’t work and it passed anyway. And the Civil Rights Act has opened the door to Congress passing into law whatever other nationwide social agendas it wants, generally ignoring any constitutional restraints in the process.
(Later, Phyllis Schlafly rightly fought against the “Equal Rights Amendment” because she understood how the word “sex” could be twisted in the future. We now see how prescient she was.)
Moreover, in 1964, homosexuality and transgenderism were deemed mental illnesses by every medical organization in the world (as they had been since at least the founding of our Republic). Those standards were not changed through any scientific inquiry, but through brutal campaigns of threats and intimidation starting in 1973 against medical authorities.
Furthermore, the world’s major religions consider homosexuality and transgenderism as out of moral bounds (as the Bible says, “abominations”). All of America's founders were religious and understood that a Republic could only last if its citizens were God-fearing. (Unfortunately, on the US Supreme Court, only Justices Alito and Thomas appear to be now.)
The Supreme Court's judicial activism
This week’s bizarre US Supreme Court ruling didn’t happen in a vacuum.
The Court was never meant to be a powerful unelected body that creates and shapes laws for the country through its rulings. It was meant to be the least powerful branch that adjudicated between disputing parties. But over the years Americans have allowed it to usurp enormous power (without fighting back) – and we are living with the consequences. The Justices are now ruling without restraints.
Recent prominent examples of this judicial overreach are:
- Roe v Wade (1973) ruled that there was a constitutional right to abortion.
- Lawrence v Texas (2003) declared that sodomy laws across America were unconstitutional.
- Obergefell v Hodges (2015) declared that state marriage laws and even state constitutional amendments that defined marriage as one man and one woman were violations of the US Constitution.
All of these rulings arrogantly pushed a leftist social agenda by distorting the Constitution to a point where it became unrecognizable.
The milquetoast conservative movement
For decades, the mainstream conservative movement has meekly allowed the political and legal establishment to frame “culture war” issues in their own distorted ways. In fact, the conservatives usually participate in it and become part of the problem.
For example, we all recognize that there are males and females, blacks and whites. But in truth, there is no such thing as “gay Americans” or “transgender Americans.” There are Americans with homosexual problems, and Americans with gender-identity psychological dysfunctions. But those “orientations” or “identities” are political inventions of the LGBT movement. However, our side rarely challenges these radical concepts, but instead goes along with the charade. So the legal and political system has an easier time going forward with it.
And it appears that none of the “conservative” lawyers in this case brought up the obvious glaring Constitutional problems with Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and similar legislation. Why not? Conceding that gave up a huge part of the case.
Trump’s so-called “conservative” judges
Was the 2016 election the beginning of the era of a sane US Supreme Court? We all hoped it would be.
But President Trump’s “conservative” Supreme Court judges have been a big disappointment, to say the least. They were, of course, recommended to him by prominent conservative groups such as the Federalist Society, which is as mushy as mud on pro-family culture-war issues.
Justice Neil Gorsuch not only voted for this ruling; he wrote the majority opinion. Recall that Gorsuch was touted as a conservative Constitutional “originalist” – one who pays close attention to the original intent. Well, not so much. If you read his majority opinion in this ruling, you will see pages and pages of utter nonsense as he vainly tries to weave a convincing legal argument out of illogical mush. It’s not even worthy of a serious analysis.
Of course, Gorsuch actually comes by his prevaricating ways honestly. As many of us observed when he was nominated, he was a member of a far-left pro-LGBT Episcopal church whose female pastor officiated “gay” marriages, according to press reports. (We wonder how Gorsuch will handle it if his daughters have disturbing encounters with "transgender" boys in their locker rooms.)
We were also betrayed by Chief Justice Roberts who voted for the ruling.
And then there’s Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Even though Kavanaugh voted the right way on this, he wrote his own dissent that concluded with this frightening tripe:
Notwithstanding my concern about the Court's transgression of the Constitution's separation of powers, it is appropriate to acknowledge the important victory achieved today by gay and lesbian Americans. Millions of gay and lesbian Americans have worked hard for many decades to achieve equal treatment in fact and in law. They have exhibited extraordinary vision, tenacity, and grit-battling often steep odds in the legislative and judicial arenas, not to mention in their daily lives. They have advanced powerful policy arguments and can take pride in today's result. Under the Constitution's separation of powers, however, I believe that it was Congress's role, not this Court's, to amend Title VII. I therefore must respectfully dissent from the [ruling].
In other words, Kavanaugh fully believes that the false concept of “gay” and “transgender” identities should ultimately be part of our laws. We can see what’s coming down the road in future rulings. And he’s one of the “conservatives.”
The other two voting against the ruling were Alito and Thomas.
Where do we go from here?
As columnist Daniel Horowitz observed today, “The ‘conservative’ legal movement, which has promoted the idea of ‘appointing better judges’ rather than fighting the entire concept of judicial supremacism, has failed miserably. This was its Waterloo.”
It’s time to adopt a completely different response to this crisis. The long string of abuses perpetrated by the Supreme Court – on prayer in the schools, abortion, sodomy laws, “gay marriage,” and now this – must be defied by citizens, their local governments, and by the states.
We must stop agreeing with far too many so-called “conservatives” who insist that Supreme Court rulings constitute “the law of the land.” There is nothing in the Constitution that remotely indicates that. The courts give opinions and rule in specific cases between disputing parties. Only Congress creates the law of the land.
We must constantly confront all judges at all levels who ignore the laws and Constitution, and simply concoct rulings to please their personal “social justice” yearnings. Impeachment, a constitutional remedy, should become part of the solution.
We must confront, in whatever matter we can, unconstitutional laws. The US Constitution was meant to work through every person – each legislator, judge, and citizen – following the laws and Constitution on his own. It was not meant that legislators would pass whatever they wanted, and then leave it up to the courts to decide what was actually constitutional.
Should bad laws and US Supreme Court “rulings” that are clearly and unambiguously unconstitutional be blindly followed? Maybe not.
Here’s the sort of defiance that there must be more of:
We’ve often said that Judge Roy Moore is the greatest pro-family figure since Phyllis Schlafly. After the ridiculous Obergefell ruling, Judge Moore (as Alabama’s Chief Justice) ordered the state’s probate judges to obey the state Constitution and refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses. He had earlier placed a Ten Commandments monument in his court building, despite phony “separation of church and state” orders by another court.
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore stands next to the granite Ten Commandments monument which he had installed in the lobby of the Judicial Building.Because of that, Judge Moore was hated by the Republican establishment, who stood by and watched as he was hideously vilified by the Left when he recently ran for US Senate in Alabama. He would have been their worst nightmare as a US Senator, boldly standing up for the truth in that political cesspool.
Don’t despair. Don’t give up. Begin fighting back.
In our daily lives, as much as possible, we all need to say NO and do what is right – and confront our officials and judges to do what is right. That is the direction MassResistance is taking – especially regarding this latest ruling. We will be discussing more of this in upcoming articles. If enough people get involved, amazing things can happen!
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Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
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SEE ALSO:
https://christiannews.net/2020/06/19/justices-alito-thomas-warn-preposterous-ruling-barring
-employers-from-firing-men-in-dresses-threat-to-religious-liberty/