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Wednesday, June 17, 2020

"Sex": It Ain't What It Used To Be



Friends, while the media concentrates on the really important issues -- like putting all policemen in jail, and giving all gangsters free puppies and a skeleton key to the city -- a quiet revolution has taken place in how our society views "sex" and gender.  You know what I'm talking about.  It's been painfully obvious for a while that leftists no longer believe in the male-female dichotomy that has undergirded Western and non-Western conceptions of sex and gender for millennia.  Well, that's not quite true: they still believe that women are good, and men are bad, but otherwise they like to suggest that sex and gender are way more complicated than just...boys and girls.

We've known that liberals feel this way, but it came as something of a shock to learn that the Supreme Court has drunk the Kool-Aid as well.  What's more, they recently transposed this very modern take on sex and gender onto the Civil Rights Act of 1964, mandating federal protection for gays and transgenders in the workplace.  Quite literally, liberals and "woke" Justices have turned our understanding of "sex" on its head, and the world will never be the same.

That's the subject of my latest article.  The implications for society and for gender relations are troubling enough, but I concentrate on the implications for the Constitution and the rule of law.

See if you agree with my slant on things...

The LGBT Community's Win is America's Loss

Recently, the Supreme Court decided that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on “sex”, also prohibits discrimination based on a person's sexual orientation or status as transgender. Two nominally conservative Justices, Roberts and Gorsuch, joined the Court's liberals in expanding federal protections for the LGBT community. Even Justice Kavanaugh, who voted in opposition to the ruling, effectively apologized for doing so and congratulated gay and transgender Americans for their historic “victory”.

While reasonable people can disagree about whether it is appropriate or necessary for federal law to prohibit such workplace discrimination, especially when in many cases local and state laws, not to mention corporate policies and procedures, already do so, the fact is that the Supreme Court's ruling perpetuates a disturbing trend: it does violence to the law itself and to the principle of the rule of law, by twisting the original and clear meaning of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

The framers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were unambiguous: they criminalized discrimination based on “sex”. A person's sex was understood at the time to be biologically determined and would fall into one of only two categories: male or female. In the mid 60s, attitudes towards homosexuality and towards “transvestites” and “cross-dressers”, as they were widely called at the time, were almost uniformly hostile. These may be considered “identities” now, but in the 1960s they were considered criminal acts and/or clear signs of mental instability. Thus, no one in Congress would have proposed legal protections for homosexuals or transgender persons, and, if they had, such legislation would not have passed. 

These are facts. One can like them or dislike them, but one can't will them out of existence.

The Supreme Court's recent reinvention of the meaning of the Civil Rights Act therefore relies on the doctrine that the original wording of the bill, and the intent of the lawmakers who passed it, doesn't matter. What matters is the uses that contemporary society wishes to make of a law adopted 56 years ago, and contemporary society, and especially its political, cultural, and economic elite, is virtually unanimous in viewing discrimination against gays and transgender people as obscene.

Therefore, since it would be nice if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had abolished discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or transgender status, the Supreme Court made the decision to pretend that it did. “Sex” now means, well, whatever we want it to mean, and in this case we want it to mean that gay and transgender Americans will receive the same protections in the workplace as women do. Case closed.

(To the objection that the Supreme Court merely broadened the concept of “sex”, I would reply that anyone who is fired for having sex in the office break room, or for having sex with his boss's wife, will quickly find that the broad-mindedness of federal judges has distinct limits.)

The bigger problem here is that, if no law or Constitutional provision has a fixed, static meaning, then every aspect of our legal and Constitutional system operates at the sole discretion of black-robed social justice warriors (for that is what most judges have become). We can expect that the law and the Constitution will be used time and time again to advance a “progressive” agenda, which the American people may or may not be ready to embrace, and which their elected legislators have declined to advance themselves. 

This is a trend that began as early as the 1950s, when the Supreme Court mandated the desegregation of public schools nationwide, based primarily on the re-purposing of the 14th Amendment. Those efforts gathered steam in the 1960s and 70s, when a whole host of political and social reforms were pioneered by activist judges. Now, with the Supreme Court's endorsement of gay marriage in 2015, and its recent prohibition of employment discrimination against gays and transgender Americans, the beat goes on.

The widespread celebration of the LGBT community's “victory” must therefore be tempered by a rising concern that the integrity of our legal and Constitutional system has been forfeited on the altar of social progress and political expediency. After all, passing controversial legislation enshrining the rights of new groups is hard. Conjuring those rights into being by judicial fiat is comparatively easy. That, however, begets an entirely new and potentially worse problem: the easier we make it for unelected judges to revolutionize our way of life and overturn the will of the people's representatives, the more often they will do it.

We may someday find ourselves living in an America where the views of the voters and of the men and women in Congress are irrelevant, and the Justices of the nation's highest court reign supreme over all of us. In fact, that day may already be here. 

In that case, we had better hope that Justices Roberts, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh are familiar with the saying “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”, because self-restraint may be the only hope we have of preventing a judicial tyranny from taking root on American soil.

Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears weekly on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480/106.9.

And here it is at American Greatness:

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/19/the-lgbt-communitys-win-is-americas-loss/ 

10 comments:

  1. Let's see now, what became The United States of America got started in 1776, at least for purposes of celebration. We founded a Constitutional Republic, but now look where we are. In 2076 on our 300th Anniversary, which probably won't be celebrated
    anyway, we will probably be The United Socialist States of America. Who knows, by then we might even be a vassal state of The People's Republic of China. My point is, that by then it won't make much difference what sex you claim you claim to be, because people will be too tired and depressed to have sex anyway.

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  2. Ha! Now on that point we must diverge, Ray. Even in this twisted, debauched epoch -- actually, especially in this epoch -- people are having plenty of sex. It's just that the not-so-mystic cord between sexual intercourse and procreation has been effectively severed by contraception. My guess is that, when the Marxist horde takes over, there will be plenty of sex...but possibly very few children. But then there aren't many children now, and possibly the Left IN ABSOLUTE POWER will behave very differently than it does now. Stalin was a great fan of population expansion, lest we forget, and an enemy of abortion and divorce. Maybe family values will get a second wind in the People's Republic of America? Who knows. Remember, so much of what the Left now does and says is POSTURING designed to position them to win elections. When the elections cease, and the conservatives dissolve into nothingness, we'll find out who these leftists REALLY are... The truth may surprise us.

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  3. That's because Comrade Stalin needed more people to send to his Gulag System after the camp populations started getting depleted.

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  4. I am quite dismayed with the Supreme Court right now. The Supreme Court has taken the original meaning of the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and turned it upside down to fit their narrative. I have no hope in Roberts or Gorsuch, they seem too busy drinking the Kool-Aid.

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  5. Dr. Waddy et al: This decision gives us yet more reason to fear that the leftist infection has taken firm root in SCOTUS. They should have said "this is a matter for legislation".

    A transcendent truth of leftist rule is that they are infallible and that any doubt of this and of their frequently changing doctrines is automatically condemned. This was obvious in the great Marxist dictatorships of the 20th century. Therefore it is probably impossible to predict what they will affect belief in when and after a time, they have absolute rule.

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  6. Dr. Waddy et al: I should have said . . . "they Would affect belief in IF . . . .

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  7. Dr. Waddy et al: Meanwhile, fasten your seatbelts for what could be a seminal event in Tulsa tomorrow. The real America must show up and it must STAND for its principles and for this President. And he must stand for us. Any concession or perceived apology to the leftist anarchists will be sneered at by them and interpreted only as weakness inviting renewed offense. This can be the point at which the real America stands up and says "uh, uh, you aren't taking our country down!" The President, in order to attract the support of spineless waverers, may employ language suggesting sympathy with those who refuse to recognize that this is a land of opportunity and life fulfilling material prosperity provided one is willing to lead a productive life. But that a sizable minority of Americans (not totally, not completely and the apostates among them are to be honored and admired for their courage) appears to expect the alarmingly high rate of dysfunctional lives and criminality among them to be ignored and rewarded no less. That cannot be endured and I hope the President at least touches on it. He need not worry about MSM interpretation of his presentation; it is guaranteed to be thoroughly dismissive of WHATEVER it consists; today's MSM is capable of nothing less bigoted!

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  8. Ray -- you're right: Stalin needed warm bodies to keep the machinery of communism humming. It was a great inconvenience that he kept turning warm bodies into cold ones...

    Linda, unfortunately what we're seeing with Roberts, Gorsuch, and sometimes even Kavanaugh is pretty typical: liberal justices are 100% reliable in voting for left-wing causes. They never waver. Conservative justices stray off the reservation constantly. Remember, the liberals face no social pressure to conform to conservatism. They attend their progressive dinner parties and people slap them on the back for being ultra-left. The conservatives, though, are living in hostile territory. They have to wonder if a conservative judgement will get them shunned, harassed, or worse. Plus, all these conservative justices are products of Ivy League academia...and we all know what a wholesome influence that is.

    Jack, you're right -- what happens in Tulsa will be fascinating on so many levels. The media's scorn is baked in, sure, but Trump can begin to reclaim the initiative and to reconnect with his core supporters at the same time. I agree with you that it profits him not at all to give in to the Left's bullying. He's done so countless times, and all he gets for his conciliatory gestures is more grief and abuse. I hope he stands shoulder to shoulder with law enforcement tomorrow -- and makes the point that we must all do so if poor, crime-ridden communities are to be saved (sometimes from themselves). Above all, he should shine a light on what Democratic rule leads to...

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  9. Dr. Waddy: That is a very salient point. So many longtime Dem cities are swamps of dysfunction and cynicism. Surely this is attributable directly to Dem misrule and affirmation is to found in the fact that the worst of the worst, NYC, was returned to sanity by a courageous conservative, Mayor Guiliani. Our bywords must be "Law and order, no more apology, want justice? Then BE just!"

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  10. Jack, "law and order" has won Republicans many an election! Will 2020 be another case in point? It could easily happen.

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