BRIEF UPDATE: No, There Isn't A Silver Lining
There were some people out there trying to discern a silver lining to yesterday's dismantling of the US Constitution and it's replacement with the Diversity Constitution. People like Sean Trende, who whispered, Hey, psssst! Roberts went along with the majority so he could appoint Gorsuch to write the opinion, rather than Ginsburg. Or Kagan or Sotomayor. It's not as radical an opinion as could have been .
Sorry. There is NO good news in this. Anyone who thinks this will not lead to the total wokening of American law and society simply hasn't been paying attention to how our system works and has worked for decades now. Yes, Gorsuch makes all the usual noises, denying that the logic of his opinion is a slippery slope, but we all know that the entire edifice of Classical Liberalism (libertarianism) is nothing but one long and exceedingly slippery slope. We've seen it, beginning with Griswold , then Roe , and all its progeny--Casey , Lawrence , and so on.
And so Gorsuch writes:
Whether other policies and practices might or might not qualify as unlawful discrimination or find justifications under other provisions of Title VII are questions for future cases, not these.
What's he talking about? What are these "other policies and practices"? C'mon, we all know. This is about bathrooms and locker rooms and dress codes. It's about diversity in all its supposed glory! It's about the Queering of America. And Gorsuch knows that. He just says that this stuff is all up in the air to string us normals along, to tamp down resistance to his ukase. Thus he pretends that anyone who disagrees is jumping to conclusions--they're just imagining things:
under Title VII itself, they say sex-segregated bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes will prove unsustainable after our decision today. But none of these other laws are before us; we have not had the benefit of adversarial testing about the meaning of their terms, and we do not prejudge any such question today. Under Title VII, too, we do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind. The only question before us is whether an employer who fires someone simply for being homosexual or transgender has discharged or otherwise discriminated against that individual “because of such individual’s sex.”
But none of us are fooled. Progs will be passing rules and regulations and laws, pushing the envelope, coercing the normals to bow to the Diversity constitutional order. Who really thinks Gorsuch is about to draw a line, now or in the future after having had "the benefit of adversarial" briefing? Who is reassured, when Gorsuch tells them that the SCOTUS will decide who can use which bathroom? Yes, this is what Constitutional law has descended to. Or, rather, this is what the American people have descended--waiting to be told what bathroom to use.
Because the sad fact is that the American people have, for the most part, acquiesced in this result already. They have submitted generations of their children to indoctrination in liberal run government schools, where their children have been subjected to indoctrination in the goodness of Queerness through "Sex Education." Maleness is the enemy in 21st century America.
At least Thomas and Alito weren't fooled:
What the Court has done today ––interpreting discrimination because of “sex” to encompass discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity––is virtually certain to have far-reaching consequences. Over 100 federal statutes prohibit discrimination because of sex. The briefs in these cases have called to our attention the potential effects that the Court’s reasoning may have under some of these laws, but the Court waves those considerations aside. As to Title VII itself, the Court dismisses questions about “bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.” Ante, at 31. And it declines to say anything about other statutes whose terms mirror Title VII’s.
The Court’s brusque refusal to consider the consequences of its reasoning is irresponsible.
"Irresponsible" is actually a pretty mild way to put it.
But don't take my word for it. Helen Andrews has an excellent article at AmCon, Justice Gorsuch Just Opened Pandora’s Box , that should disabuse you of any notion that the penumbra you're being asked to perceive is a silver lining. Here are edited excerpts, but I urge you to do yourself a favor--follow the link and read it all. Andrews will clue you in to all the gory details:
Six months ago journalist Christopher Caldwell published a book asserting that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had grown into a “rival constitution” that superseded the old Constitution. The New York Times review singled out for particular ridicule the sentence on the penultimate page of The Age of Entitlement where Caldwell advises conservatives that “the only way back to the free country of their ideals was through the repeal of the civil rights laws.”
No one is laughing now.
[Gorsuch's decree] is not a narrow ruling that just means you can’t fire a person for being gay. Extending civil rights law to protect a whole new category carries with it a host of ancillary protections.
Harassment is a form of workplace discrimination. An employee can’t be subjected to a “hostile work environment” because of their membership in a protected class. Under Bostock, an LGBT employee could allege a hostile work environment if a coworker expressed the wrong opinion about Prop 8 or said he believed a person’s sex is determined at birth. Some employers are already justifying firing workers who won’t use someone’s preferred pronouns because discrimination law requires it. Misgendering, they say, is harassment.
Diversity training is a multi-billion dollar industry because of Title VII.
De facto hiring quotas are another inevitable consequence of civil rights law as it has been interpreted.
It is no use protesting that the text of Title VII doesn’t mandate any of this, or that the Bostock opinion limits itself to outlawing explicit policies against hiring LGBT workers. The whole story of employment discrimination law, from 1964 to today, is an endless parade of new mandates not specified in the statute being hatched by human resources departments, adopted by companies eager to fend off lawsuits, and ultimately incorporated into case law.
Anti-discrimination law is kept vague for precisely this reason. It gives the activists more room to get creative.
Title VII doesn’t require performance evaluations, grievance procedures, written job descriptions, speech codes, minority hiring targets, or diversity bonuses—yet all of these have been extrapolated from it.
And of course the Bostock ruling won’t stay confined to employment law. The majority opinion protests, disingenuously, that “sex-segregated bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes” are “questions for future cases.” But federal law is full of prohibitions on sex discrimination (Justice Alito’s dissent lists over 100 such statutes), and every one of those will have to be reconsidered in light of today’s ruling.
Gorsuch claims that yesterday’s ruling was grounded in judicial modesty. It doesn’t matter that sodomy was illegal in 49 states when the Civil Rights Act was passed, he says. If you can’t fire a woman for marrying a man, you can’t fire a man for doing the same without discriminating on the basis of sex, simple as that. Alito’s dissent accuses such rigid textualism of treating laws “as if they were messages picked up by a powerful radio telescope from a distant and utterly unknown civilization.”
Once conservatives start thinking about what changes would have to be made to civil rights law before the left’s grip on our country’s institutions can begin to be loosened, it won’t stop with clarifications to the definition of sex.
I'm here to tell you, nothing will be the same after this. The Left is coming for the normals. And "conservatives" have given them the legal tools to enforce submission.
A final thought. Donald Trump owed his election in great part to the visceral opposition of normals to PC attempts to outlaw normality. Isn't that essentially what we're currently seeing and have been seeing since the election? Anyone who takes a deep dive into the true ideology behind BLM and Antifa will soon learn that it's really all about sex. It's about the Queer Constitution. My question is: How will Trump respond to this? Because if he doesn't respond in some meaningful way, then Gorsuch and Roberts have handed the Progs the most effective voter suppression tool ever.
UPDATE: Joy Pullman at The Federalist gets right to the bottom line:
The ruling will lead to a tsunami of polarizing court cases and further degradation of Americans’ natural rights to free speech, to free association, and to worshipping God as their consciences require.
In Monday’s ruling inserting “gender identity” into the word “sex” in a 1964 employment law, the U.S. Supreme Court called a man a woman, possibly leading to eventually forcing everyone else to do so also. ... All this in the name of “equality,” a word that has become a totalitarian weapon.