The Roberts court will go down in history as the one that established and defended the role of big government to intrude into the most intimate and personal decisions individual American families make. It will be known as the Supreme Court that curtailed—rather than expanded—human liberty.
And that is sad.
Tragic, in fact.
The latest evidence of this court’s bias toward expanding the government’s reach at the expense of individual autonomy comes in the decision affirming a Tennessee law that bans gender transition treatments for minors.
That law takes decisions about a child’s care out of the hands of parents and places them in the hands of politicians. The court’s decision says the ultimate responsibility for raising a child lies not with the parents or the child but with state government.
The court’s position may be difficult to contemplate, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise.
This same Supreme Court already has advanced similar reasoning in overturning a half-century’s worth of reproductive rights rulings with the Dobbs decision in 2022.
At the heart of that decision was a conviction that women, their partners and their doctors could not be trusted to make the right choices regarding family planning. Politicians, on the other hand, could be depended on to exercise fair and humane judgment about whether women could and should continue pregnancies safely.
That many of these politicians asserted their ability to make these decisions without knowing or comprehending the most basic facts about women’s reproductive cycles and systems did not at all undermine the court’s faith in government’s infinite wisdom regarding family planning.
This latest decision just builds on that logic. It merely extends government’s authority beyond the womb. It says that politicians should have a larger voice in determining a child’s identity—and weighing a child’s health care options—than parents, doctors or even the child.
I will admit I do not understand a certain branch of conservatism’s obsession with persecuting transgender individuals.
What puzzles me about it is the determined distortion of reality. The advocates for laws such as the Tennessee one characterize family decisions to have children undergo costly gender transition treatments as somehow whimsical or carefree.
They clearly never have talked with—or at least never listened to—families or children in those situations.
If they had, they would know that no parent makes such a decision without first doing a lot of research and giving the matter a great deal of thought. They make the decision because they want what’s best for their child—not because they want to make a political statement.
And they make the decision even though they know they will be subject to a great deal of judgment and condemnation from bigots who think social media memes are more carefully reasoned than any of the Federalist Papers.
The court’s affirmation of politicians’ unerring insight also is an insult to doctors. It says that medical professionals who have taken oaths to do no harm would hurt young patients just to score political points.
What makes this so disturbing is that so many of this court’s justices style themselves as strict constructionists or advocates for the original intent of the founders.
This is not a doctrine to which I adhere. Nor do I believe that the founders themselves thought of their work as perfect and therefore incapable of refinement and improvement.
But those who do cling to such a doctrine, if they’re being intellectually honest, must grant that our Constitution granted the broadest possible discretion to the judgment of individuals, not government. We would not even have this Constitution if the drafters had not agreed to the adoption of a Bill of Rights—the first 10 amendments—that severely curtailed government’s authority, particularly when it came to intruding into the lives of citizens.
This court’s decisions make it impossible for anyone to take seriously the conservative justices’ arguments about honoring the founders’ intentions.
Or, for that matter, their protestations that they have no partisan motivations.
Increasingly, this court is coming to resemble the one that gave America the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which entrenched segregation, damaged who knows how many lives and thrust this country on a path of racial discord that we Americans still walk today.
Not a proud legacy at all.
