Overturn Bostock!
On June 18, the Supreme Court ruled that a Tennessee law banning dangerous “gender-affirming care” for minors did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Skrmetti should be applauded as a victory for restoring sanity and protecting children from barbaric procedures. However, a specter looms over the Court’s jurisprudence on sex and gender that has the potential to wreak havoc.
The infamous “textualist decision”—Bostock v. Clayton County—looms over each Court case related to sexual orientation and civil rights. While the Court rejected Bostock’s logic in this instance, the Supreme Court needs to do the right thing and overturn that case.
Much ink has been spilled regarding Bostock’s holding.
In a confounding majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch declared that the legislators behind Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act understood the word “sex” to include sexual orientation. Gorsuch attempted to revise history by arguing that “because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” Title VII needed to be amended to reflect this fact.
The real salt in the wound was Gorsuch’s attempt to posit the decision as a victory for the originalist school of interpretation. But as Justice Samuel Alito wrote, it represented “the theory that courts should ‘update’ old statutes so that they better reflect the current values of society.”
Alito’s dissent compared the majority to a pirate ship—sailing “under a textualist flag” while representing the judicial philosophy disdained by textualists. The “illogical” and “arrogant” opinion could not survive its logic.
Alito wrote:
The Court argues that an applicant could not answer the question whether he or she is homosexual without knowing something about sex… Just because an applicant cannot say whether he or she is hom
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
