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.

Limited Options?

Some of The Wall Street Journal‘s news personalities claim that not only are America’s options few, but we are Running Out of Options in the Gaza War. And further, as their subheadline intimates, those options are purely American political re-electability options.

Biden’s stalled cease-fire plan is a political vulnerability ahead of his debate with Trump. Israel and Hamas have a longer timeline.

Of course they do, and of course the news personalities’ bit is nonsense.

While it is true that our—not only Biden’s personal political prospects (and Trump’s, come to that)—are limited, it’s only in the fetid imaginations of pressmen that our options are running out.

Putting any emphasis at all on any sort of ceasefire in the Gaza Strip is dangerously misguided. There can be no hope of a ceasefire with an enemy that will strike at will regardless of the terms of any extant ceasefire agreement, just as Hamas did last October, in violation of the then-existing ceasefire agreement, and just as Hamas has done repeatedly before then in violation of all of those ceasefire agreements.

Our option as a nation—disregard self-serving politicians—is restricted to a single one. Support Israel fully in its war for survival against butchers whose own sole goal is the extermination of Israel. That war, of course, is the source of the longer timeline of Israel and Hamas (notice that: a single timeline, not separate ones for the nation and the terrorists). Hamas mucky-mucks have promised repeated October 7s, no matter the costs the terrorists inflict on Gaza Strip civilians, until the terrorists achieve their goal of extermination. Which makes Israel’s timeline stretch until they’ve succeeded in destroying (not exterminating—an out of line IDF general has badly conflated the two) Hamas.

On reflection, though, there is one more national option, even if Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden lacks both the political courage and the morals to apply it. That is to cut off Hamas’ source of money and arms: going back to enforcing existing sanctions on Iran (which are less effective, now, due to Russia’s and People’s Republic of China’s support, but still damaging), to begin sinking Iranian arms shipping and interdicting overland arms shipments through Iraq before it can deliver arms and ammunition, and severely damaging, if not destroying, Iran’s nuclear weapons development facilities cybernetically and, if necessary, kinetically. Dealing with Iran also would have the happy side effect of weakening Hezbollah’s ability to continue its terrorist attacks against Israel from the north.

A Thought on the Alitos

News personality Lauren Windsor had a thought regarding Justice Samual Alito and his wife and some flag-flying. A number of letter-writers in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section had thoughts regarding Windsor’s hit piece.

I have my own thought, beginning from this remark by one of the letter-writers who (also) decried Windsor’s piece:

Justice Alito is being blamed for Mrs Alito’s flag flying.

Along with all the other criticisms of Windsor’s dishonesty stands this: she deeply insults Ms Alito, along with women generally, by suggesting that the wife is necessarily subordinate to the husband and that the wife is nothing more than the little woman, who needn’t worry her pretty little head about things that are in the man’s realm of responsibility.

What bigoted, sexist garbage Windsor has spewed.

It Doesn’t Get Any Clearer

A portion of oral argument in Moms for Liberty and Young America’s Foundation, et al v US Department of Education was relayed to Southeastern Legal Foundation Executive Director Kim Hermann while she was at a Heritage Foundation conference centered on addressing the Biden administration’s general penchant for putting boys into girls’ locker rooms and sports prioritize[ing] gender identity over sex in a broad range of milieus. That portion:

The judge allegedly asked a Justice Department lawyer to explain what expertise the Department of Education has on human biology and sexuality that justifies judicial deference to the feds’ new interpretation of “sex.” The DOJ lawyer replied “I guess I’m not sure,” according to Hermann’s colleagues.

What a sweeping indictment of Chevron Deference by the Biden administration defendants in the case.

Lies of Teachers Union Managers

This one comes from the Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates. She told WBBM‘s Political Editor, Craig Dellimore, in their Sunday interview,

Conservatives don’t even want Black children to be able to read. Remember, these same conservatives are the conservatives who probably would have been championing Black codes, you know, during reconstruction or thereafter. So, forgive me again if conservatives pushing back on educating immigrant children, Black children, children who live in poverty, doesn’t make my anxiety go up. That’s what they’re supposed to say. That is literally a part of the oath that they take to be right wing.

Not so much. Pushing for alternatives to public schools—voucher schools, charter schools, pods, homeschooling—is what Conservatives do explicitly to make it possible for black children, other minority children, all children trapped in failing public schools to learn to read and to learn to do arithmetic.

Conservatives championed Black codes during Reconstruction? Apparently, Davis Gates is a product of her public school American history: she’s utterly ignorant. It was the Democratic Party that was creating Black codes during Reconstruction—and that created the Ku Klux Klan to prey on freed Blacks and their White supporters—and it was Party that pushed for gun control laws aimed at keeping those same Blacks and White supporters unarmed and helpless against the KKK.

Now Party is adamantly opposed to those alternative schools, and Davis Gates is right there with them, doing her best to keep black children, other minority children, all children from learning much of anything by keeping them trapped in those public schools.

Davis Gates is just one more example of the intrinsic dishonesty of teachers unions and of the failure of public schools, including in Chicago.