Justice Ketanji Roars

The black woman justice on the Supreme Court, who was appointed explicitly because she is a black woman, the search for a black woman for the then-vacant seat being announced by Biden, has been performing exactly as you would expect a black woman appointed to high intellectual office would perform: like a black woman promoted because she is a black woman.

SCOTUS struck down a lower court’s ruling that banned so-called conversion therapy. This a terrible name, and a misnomer, for these services: because there are no such creatures as “homosexuals” or “trans”. There are only people, male and female. The modern fad of sexual “orientation” does not, and cannot, create new kinds of human beings.

People who no longer enjoy the hobby of homosexuality, or fail to find further delight in pretending to be the opposite sex, often seek help in avoiding these behaviors. Colorado would ban anybody from providing this help. SCOTUS said no to Colorado.

The Court issued a 66-page ruling, lead-authored, if you can believe it, by Neil Gorsuch, who infamously blew it on “sexual orientation”, finding that right hiding in a dark corner of the Constitution where it remained undiscovered for centuries. Anyway, in 31 of these new pages, he says you can’t stop people from talking to other people using words Colorado doesn’t like. Even if those words are anti-Equality words.

Gorsuch was joined by all the other justices, even all the women (all appointed because Equality, by the way), save the black woman appointed to the court because she was a black woman. The remaining 35 pages, more than half, were taken up by her explaining how she finally, at last, knows what a woman is.

Kidding! She didn’t know in her confirmation hearings, and she doesn’t know now.

The gist of her main argument is that doctors use speech (well, most of them), and Colorado has a right to label speech medicine, and therefore they have the right to regulate speech when it is used as medicine.

She says certain “therapies seek to encourage patients to change their behavior in an attempt to ‘change’ their identity.” Which can be true if “identity” is a cloak one puts on, and false if a person is in essence that identity ( I use essence in the strict Aristotelian sense). There are only two essential identities in man: male and female. No one can change an essential identity. It is impossible. But anybody can pretend, or falsely believe, to be anything. Call this kind of identity fantasy to distinguish it from essential.

One could argue that all have the “right” to claim any fantasy. But it does not follow, and it is not true, that all then have the additional “right” to force everybody else to acknowledge their fantasy, or join in on it. The notion is incoherent: it could be my fantasy that I am a person who talks people out of their fantasies, and that has to be recognized as legitimate, too.

All forms of sexual “orientation” are fantasy. All people are in essence sexual reproductive creatures, with known biologies, which, of course, can malfunction in various ways. But that these are seen as malfunctions (a man who cannot produce sperm, say) proves the essence.

It’s worth quoting this:

Over the past few decades, however, the premise of conversion therapy (in whatever form) has been widely discredited within the medical and scientific community. Conversion therapy is, at bottom, “based on a view of gender diversity that runs counter to scientific consensus.”

I don’t know if she has hidden a pun in there, but perhaps not. If the scientific consensus says a man can be a woman, or that sodomy is good, then the scientific consensus can go—but I will keep it civilized. The scientific consensus, if it believes these things, proves many scientists are raving maniacal idiots who are slave to public opinion, and the views of these people cannot thus be the basis of law.

This also applies to any consensus of “doctors”. People who have memorized bones, I have written repeatedly, have no special claim to moral insight. And anyway, not a few of them make their speciality killing, or in carving people up to help them in their fantasies. Which means our easy deference to this set of people is itself nuts.

The dissent is a pean to the consensus of any organized body of science. But science cannot tell you what is right and wrong. Laws are based on right and wrong. Laws are therefore not scientific, and it does not follow because one, many, or even all scientists make some claim about how a thing in the world works, that we ought to behave one way or the other. Any answer we come to about right and wrong will not be because science.

The dissent is rich in error, but I don’t want to blunt the reader’s sensitivity. One last quote:

Because people’s identities are simply “a part of the normal spectrum of human diversity,” id., at 535, the community has determined that efforts to change a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity will necessarily be ineffective.

Part of the normal spectrum of human diversity includes criminals of every sort, torturers, necrophiliacs, zoophiles, sociopaths, murderers, arsonists, NPR listeners, pedophiles, cannibals and even over-promoted judges. Many of these are “orientations”.

This is therefore a stupid, stupid, yet common, argument. It is the consensus she mentions. Worse, it’s wrong even if you believe in sexual “orientations”, because many people have in fact found freedom from behaviors they no longer wanted. The efforts were not ineffective.

I will leave the rest of the errors for the readers to discover himself.

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