So Much for Our ‘Conservative Court’

Americans who identify as conservatives thought that, when President Donald Trump was able to get three conservative justices appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Barrett—the tide favoring the institution of the family, which is based on marriage exclusively between one man and one woman, had finally turned. More so after Justice Barrett cast the deciding vote to block the limit on religious gatherings in New York State.

Well, think again.

In a victory for transgender rights, the Supreme Court on Monday rejected a case brought by parents against an Oregon high school that allowed transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice based on the gender with which they identify, rather than their sex assigned at birth.

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For clarification, the Supreme Court decides to hear a case based on the agreement of at least four of the nine justices to grant the petition for certiorari, a brief asking the Supreme Court to hear his case. If four justices agree to grant the petition, the Court then considers the case.

The dispute was brought in 2017 by a group of parents who argued that the policy enacted by Dallas School District No. 2 in Dallas, Oregon, and left in place by lower courts violated other students’ privacy rights. The policy was created after a transgender girl who calls herself Elliot Yoder sought to use the boys’ bathroom and locker room at her high school until she graduated.

As reported by the Associated Press, Herb Grey, an attorney for the parents who opposed the school’s favorable transgender policy, argued that “the district’s policy to allow Yoder into such private spaces violated the civil rights of the majority of the students who do not identify as transgender. Boys using the locker room and bathroom feel embarrassed and ashamed to have to disrobe in the presence of another student who was biologically female.”

In 2019, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education released a missive titled Male and Female He Created Them. It explains that the desire to change one’s sex “speaks of a gradual process of denaturalization, that is a move away from nature and towards an absolute option for the decision of the feelings of the human subject.”

The Congregation continues:

In this understanding of things, the view of both [sexual] identity and the family become subject to the same “liquidity” and “fluidity” that characterize other aspects of post-modern culture, often founded on nothing more than a confused concept of freedom in the realm of feelings and wants, or momentary desires provoked by emotional impulses and the will of the individual, as opposed to anything based on the truths of existence.

In practice, the advocacy for the different identities often presents them as being of completely equal value compared to each other. This, however, actually negates the relevance of each one. This has particular importance for the question of sexual difference. In fact, the generic concept of “non-discrimination” often hides an ideology that denies the difference as well as natural reciprocity that exists between men and women.

Of course, Monday’s decision is not the first time the “conservative” justices on the bench have failed to distinguish sexual orientation or gender confusion from the biological sex of a person.

In June, pro-sexual liberals notched a Court victory with unexpected votes by the conservative justices. In Bostock v. Clayton County, the Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the firing of Gerald Bostock, who had expressed interest in establishing a gay softball league at work, discriminated against LGBTQ+ employees and was a direct violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Trump-appointed justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion.

Gorsuch had relied upon Justice Scalia’s unanimous opinion in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc. (1998), in which Scalia opined:

Male on male sexual harassment in the workplace was assuredly not the principal evil Congress was concerned with when it enacted Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964]. But statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.

The protections of Title VII, Scalia concluded, “must extend to sexual harassment of any kind that meets the statutory requirements.”

Aside from the unconstitutional infringement upon the rights of heterosexuals in being forced to accept unnatural sexual dispositions as human rights, the Supreme Court now equates gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female) and the social role of gender (the adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior) as an immutable part of an individual’s identity, whether a person is straight or gay.

We should also not expect too much from Justice Kavanaugh, who passed up the opportunity to defend the life in a mother’s womb.

In 2018, Kavanaugh joined a majority of the high court in a 6-3 decision that turned away an appeal from two states, Kansas and Louisiana, after they withheld tax funds from Planned Parenthood, the country’s biggest abortion provider and the protagonist of far-left feminists. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his dissenting opinion, directly accused fellow justices of refusing to take up the case because Planned Parenthood is involved, implying political motives to protect the group.

Undoubtedly, we have our work cut out for us. A Biden Administration would most certainly seek to propel radical gender ideology to new heights. It’s bad enough that, under the Trump Administration, the State Department for the last two years during the month of June—declared by President Barak Obama as LGBT Pride Month—displays the rainbow flag on most embassies and consulates throughout the world.

All this may lead one to become a pessimist. That would be humanly understandable since we are going up against a destructive political tidal wave. On the contrary, this is when we become even more politically active. In addition, we must be as faithful as ever to our Lord’s teachings and the example He provided us. He, too, was opposed by the political leaders of His time, which is why He was put to death. But the early martyrs knew that their treasure was not on earth, but in Heaven. So must we.

[Photo credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images News]

Author

  • Fr. Mario Alexis Portella

    Fr. Mario Alexis Portella is a priest of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Florence, Italy. He was born in New York and holds a doctorate in canon law and civil law from the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. He is the author of Islam: Religion of Peace?—The Violation of Natural Rights and Western Cover-Up (Westbow Press, 2018).

tagged as: Politics

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