In that post I mocked Justice Sotomayor’s characteristically dumb questions, but even Sonia came around to see a First Amendment violation when it was staring her in the face. Eight Justices joined to strike down the Colorado law. Not Justice Jackson! Free speech in this case would “open a can of worms,” she wrote. Funny how free speech does that.
“It would be far better for the majority to simply silence such dissenting voices in the name of science,” is how Professor Turley characterized her “reasoning.” Turley goes on to document what he calls “the chilling jurisprudence of Justice Jackson,” including a pronounced dismissal of free speech values. By “chilling” he means “incompetent.”
These laws always have been viewpoint-based bans on speech because various authorities disagreed with them. NPR, a reliable mouthpiece of the totalitarian Left, stated, “Conversion therapy is generally defined as a treatment used to change a person’s attraction to individuals of the same sex or to ‘cure’ gender dysphoria. The therapy has been forcefully repudiated by every major medical organization in the country, on grounds that the therapy doesn’t work and often leads to deep depression and suicidal thoughts and actions in minors.” “Speech is violence,” I believe, is how the woke like to put it.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority (or against Jackson) said that the Colorado law “impermissibly regulated [the plaintiff’s] speech by forbidding her from doing anything in her counseling that attempts to change a client’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” The First Amendment, Gorsuch went on, “reflects … a judgment that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for discovering truth … any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an ‘egregious’ assault on both of those commitments.”
Many commentators have noted, as I havem the apparent hypocrisy of Jackson and her partisan allies endorsing the drug and surgical “conversion” of minors’ sexual identities after encouragement by teachers and others (she refused to define what a woman is, in her confirmation hearing, you’ll recall) but calling talk therapy “harmful.”
Turley is uncharacteristically harsh in his criticism of the DEI Justice, but she deserves it, as does the party that inflicted her on us. He writes in part…
“Justice Elena Kagan could not withhold her frustration with her colleague, noting that “[b]ecause the State has suppressed one side of a debate, while aiding the other, the constitutional issue is straightforward.” She added that Jackson’s view “rests on reimagining—and in that way collapsing—the well-settled distinction between viewpoint-based and other content-based speech restrictions.”…
“Of course, we just went through a pandemic when censorship and orthodoxy were dressed up as science. Leading scientific figures were canceled and harassed. That was the case with Jay Bhattacharya, who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration and was a vocal critic of COVID-19 policies. Bhattacharya was targeted due to his dissenting views on health policy, including opposing wholesale shutdowns of schools and businesses.
“He and other scientists were later vindicated. European allies that did not shut down their schools fared far better than we did, including avoiding a national mental health and learning crisis. We simply never had that debate…
“…[M]any questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — the government later recognized both positions.
“Others questioned the six-foot rule, which shut down many businesses, as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci later admitted that the rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.” Yet not only did it result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, but the media further ostracized dissenting critics….”
“All of it was orthodoxy masquerading as science. Yet, Jackson sees the protection of dissenting scientific and professional views as a “can of worms” that the courts should avoid in favor of state and assocational imposed truths. She wrote that allowing such opposing views “ultimately risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.”…
“Ironically, Colorado has now succeeded in dramatically strengthening free speech in its repeated failures to curtail it. The Democratic legislators have made the state arguably the most hostile to free speech in the nation.
“Colorado’s Supreme Court sought to bar President Donald Trump from the ballot. Notably, while many of us viewed Trump’s views on the 2020 election to be protected speech, Colorado treated it as conduct and advocacy of insurrection.
“It was Colorado that sought to force bakers, photographers, and web designers to produce work in favor of same-sex marriages despite their religious objections. Each effort was supported by the Tenth Circuit and each failed in spectacular fashion before the Supreme Court.
“As many of us celebrate this victory for free speech, these advocates are denouncing the ruling in apocalyptic terms.
“What is most chilling is that Jackson is now routinely called the model for new nominees, including the push to pack the Supreme Court with an instant liberal majority.
“If so, Jackson’s radical views on constitutional interpretation could be replicated on a new packed Court.”
In his last lines, Turley has provided a practical solution to my query, “Now what?” Now American voters who are not positively inclined toward single party rule and an ideology that has brought us open borders, law enforcement break-downs, anti-white racism, looming socialism and Ketanji Brown Jackson need to be civically engaged and responsible, and vote against the party that has decided to embrace all of this and more.
If the apathy of the U.S. public is such that it can’t rouse itself to better than a 40% participation in this November’s election, it will deserve what it gets, and what it gets will not be the republic that has so far been the light of the world.
That’s “what.”
Ethics Alarms 
This is why I think it’s become unarguable that in a general election, the Republican needs to get the presumption of support unless something terrible comes out. The Democrats have turned into the party of radical university professors, and they are unapologetic about it.
I hate one party rule. One party rule tends to lead to that one party becoming corrupt because I believe power has that tendency for most human beings, but it’s hard to see an alternative.
Jackson’s position tracks with most liberals, the college intelligentsia, and people who act like they are too sensitive to hear an opposing argument. There is no longer an intellectual sense of rugged pursuit of truth in the open frontier to be discovered by hard work and investigation.
They claim they trust experts, but that’s not really what’s happening. If the experts shifted, these people would just say the “right wing” took over the institution and it wasn’t trustworthy anymore. They trust their emotional reactions based on looking at the world as a giant kindergarten circle or some kind of therapist’s office.
Biden has pretty much assured now that Jackson is going to go down as one of the worst justices in all of the court’s history by nominating someone who has no business on the court. Because she’s so unapologetically inept, I think she will rightfully deserve that label. I hope she changes course, but I don’t see that ever happening.
There is a therapist based in Utah who has done conversion therapy for gay men for decades. He gave a presentation about his work and clients. Much of his clientele sought out his services themselves; they wanted to be heterosexual. To reconcile their orientation with their religious and/or sociopolitical values. I’m sure there were also clients who were pressured into seeking his services by family.
If a client wants conversion therapy for himself, the Colorado law would stand in the way of that. It doesn’t make sense to me to block a person from seeking a particular kind of care, if they are in distress about their conflicting desires and values and the care itself isn’t hazardous. But it does make sense from the perspective of progressives in the culture war – can’t let people try to diminish the ranks of the alphabet soup! They should change their values to fit their orientation, not change their predelictions to fit their values!
I’ve read and heard repeatedly that sexual orientation is fixed in stone. Yet from Kinsey’s time to that hasn’t been validated by longitudinal studies of sexual preference. That claim is a convenient tagline for the progressive side of the culture war.
Interesting side note from that therapist’s presentation: his clients who were “successfully” converted by his services stated that they still possessed instinctive, uh… romantic inclinations toward other men. But now, they also experienced romantic attraction toward women. Effectively, they became bisexual! The therapy didn’t eliminate sexual interests, it expanded them to include more types of potential partners. Whatever is going on in the human mind and development, it seems we still have a lot to understand about sexual orientation.
I am inclined to believe that there are certainly some who have an innate homosexual predilection. And all cultures have come to terms with this. Similarly, there is no way around accepting this fact (in our own culture).
But what happened in the West and, in the 1980’s in America? A concerted movement by homosexual deviants to normalize not only (say) latent faggots, which are inevitable, but to (literally) indoctrinate the culture to view the choice to “act out” homosexuality in the same sense as you “choose” a flavor of ice cream. (See: After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s)
A PR man and a psychologist put their heads together and developed a marketing strategy to 1) normalize homosexuality and 2) transform those who opposed this as “abnormal”. Classic transvaluation of values!
To get an immediate sense of this see this clip from American Beauty:
Those two — tax attorney and anesthesiologist — are the ONLY “well adjusted” ones in the entire film!
It must be understood how these insidious currents operate. And it must be understood that they start with laxity and toleration in one area … and it evolves from one deviancy into a hundred. Then, your children “identify” as little animals or (take it from a local exponent) your lover drags you around on a leash feeding you dog biscuits for sexual favors or you dress up in diapers and really regress. There is no end to it.
It is very likely that if a will existed, andcwere backed up with spiritual conviction, that sick people with sick derangements could achieve some level of healing, right? But from where would this “will” come? The entire definition of normality has been (following James Lindsay) been “queered”. This perversion connects to psychology, to culture, and definitely to ethics and morals. But in our rotted ultra-liberalism it is thoughtcrime to state what I have just said.
See James Lindsay on the “queering” of children. Though it seems uniquely geared toward sexuality and gender, in the backgrounding of it there are currents of potent but occulted political and ideological radicalism.
https://youtu.be/obs6x10fqfM?si=qJr_QNsGhTKOFtc_
Up to a point Lindsay is quite good. But he takes very string stances against ideological counter-currents to contend with the ideological queering trends. Thus he defines a “woke Right” and equates counter-opposition to Hitlerian ideology. I am not making this up!
Perhaps the title “The Stupid Justice” is too harsh.
If her questions indicate the pinnacle of the development of her reasoning, she may not be stupid but simply only having achieved the breadth of reason of a very smart, ful of potential 18 year old boy.
During oral arguments about birthright citizenship, she seemed to suggest that committing a crime would somehow automatically grant citizenship because it would “subject someone to the jurisdiction” of a nation. I mean, talk about a WOODEN, literal interpretation when it is convenient.
I am hoping her questioning was just to test the legal principles and not something she actually believes. Many justices do that, and it’s a common practice in law school or when new laws are being debated.