Should be Easy

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a Biden administration suit against Tennessee over whether that State can restrict medical treatments for transgender minors.

[T]he court said it would hear the Biden administration’s challenge to a Tennessee law that bans gender-transition care, such as medications that can delay the onset of puberty and hormones that can cause physical changes such as the development of facial hair or breasts.

Leave aside the question of whether there is such a thing as “transgender minors.” There is, but they’re exceedingly rare, and those cases are easily identified by physiological factors like stunted development of physical sexual characteristics that are consistent with the child’s DNA-determined sex, or excessive development of physical sexual characteristics that are contrary to the child’s DNA-determined sex.

The Court’s ruling in the Tennessee case should be a short, sweet one-pager: Yes, the State can restrict medical treatments for transgender minors.

What would be nearly as bad as ruling against Tennessee would be the Court expanding on that simple Yes by writing limits—minimum or maximum—to the State’s authority to restrict. Limits on the authority to restrict are themselves political decisions that must be left to the political branches of our Federal government—Congress and the President, or Congress overriding a veto—and to the State governments individually.

Lab-Grown Meat for our Troops

And for everyone else, too. DoD wants to have this stuff for our soldiers to the tune of a $450 million budget increase—increase, not an initial funding—for BioMADE to produce meat in a petri dish for our military’s chow halls and, presumably, for what passes for MREs these days.

The Department of Defense is funding a bio-industrial manufacturing company that has proposed feeding US troops lab-grown meat to help “reduce the CO2 footprint of food production.”

BioMADE’s proposal includes

growing meat and other kinds of food by “utilizing one carbon molecule (C1) feedstocks for food production.”

There are plenty of reasons to object to this expenditure and to this food “development” program. One thing not being addressed, though, is the simple fact that there are some few lipids—fat molecules—that our bodies cannot make from scratch and must be eaten intact. They are essential lipids in precisely the same manner that essential amino acids cannot be made by our bodies and must be eaten intact by eating…meat. (I’m eliding here the question of whether these essential amino acids will be produced in the petri dishes.) These essential lipids are best taken in by eating…red meat. Which is not the petri dish meat—which isn’t really meat, but protein—that BioMADE wants to inflict on sell to our troops.

Will BioMADE be growing fat in adjacent petri dishes? Or will our troops’ diets suffer, and their health be heavily endangered, by that lack?