Category Archives: morality

A Bad Ruling

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US District Judge Richard Bennett (Maryland District) ruled that the US Naval Academy can continue to use race as a “factor” in its admission decisions. Never mind that the Supreme Court recognized in its Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard decision that using race in determining admission fitness is intrinsically racist.

This is a terrible ruling on two counts (at least). One is Bennet’s decision to ignore the Supreme Court’s rescission of Chevron Deference as a factor in assessing the legitimacy of a regulation or, by extension, a law. Bennett, in his ruling, chose to ignore the Supreme Court’s rulings in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo and Relentless v Department of Commerce, the two cases the eliminated Chevron Defense as a court decision criterion. Bennett deliberately chose to apply the Chevron technique to his USNA ruling. He closed his ruling with this:

In short, this Court defers to the executive branch with respect to military personnel decisions. Specifically, as noted by Justice Kavanaugh in Austin v United States Navy Seals, “the President of the United States, not any federal judge” ultimately makes such decisions.

Bennett chose to elide in that cite that Austin predates Loper and Relentless, and so any deference aspect of Austin is overridden by them. At least as tellingly, Bennett chose not to disclose that Kavanaugh was writing in the Court’s decision to stay the case pending a lower court’s decision and, more directly to the present matter, that Austin concerned the Navy’s decision to mandate vaccination against the Covid-19 virus; it was wholly irrelevant to any question of the place of race in getting into the Seals (or the Navy or any of the Navy’s training institutions) in the first place.

That’s the technical part of this bad ruling. Bennett also wrote this:

The US Naval Academy is distinct from a civilian university. … During the admissions procedure, which is distinct from that of a civilian university, race or ethnicity may be one of several non-determinative factors considered.

More briefly treated by me, but far more important because it’s on the merits of the matter, is the question of racism in our government institutions. Racism is racism regardless of where it is practiced. That it’s done by our military academies in no way legitimizes it; on the contrary, it deprecates those academies and their ability to train the officers who will lead our men and women in combat. Bennett’s ruling is every bit as racist on this side of the question as was then-President Franklin Roosevelt’s (D) decision to refuse to integrate our military on the other side. Race must be wholly irrelevant in admissions (and everywhere else), neither emphasized in order to block nor emphasized in order to push forward.

This is a ruling that badly wants overruling on appeal.

Go Ahead On

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A person asked MarketWatch whether it would be all right to wear a MAGA hat to work, given that some coworkers had worn Kamala pins to work. Quentin Fottrell’s response was weak. He began with this:

You may be seeking likeminded coworkers, but you could end up creating division instead.

Not at all. Any division associated with wearing the hat or those Kamala pins is “created” solely by the political hysterics who manufacture objection to anything they don’t personally approve.

Then he added this, after a long dissertation on matters only tangentially related:

For you, a MAGA hat could mean more secure borders, but to someone on the opposite end of the political spectrum, it could represent an anti-immigration stance. Similarly, for you it may represent Trump’s survival after he was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet, but to a coworker it could bring to mind that the president-elect is, whether you agree with the verdict or not, a convicted felon.

That’s Fottrell’s—and those “others'”—dependence on the Left’s Newspeak Dictionary definition, and his projection of that definition onto the questioner. The actual definition, from American English dictionaries is simply Make America Great Again. Despite Fottrell’s claim, the hat and the slogan mean only support for Trump and for America, neither more nor less. Characterizations of Trump based on that, it bears repeating, are merely figments of the imaginations of political hysterics.

Then Fottrell closed with this:

Don’t jeopardize your paycheck or workplace harmony. You would miss either one after it’s gone.

The former, maybe, if there are actual employer repercussions, which would be illegal, whether or not resisted. Fottrell misunderstood the latter though: the existence of the question demonstrates that the harmony already is absent.

The questioner should go ahead on and wear the hat. On the other hand, it’s foolish to be provocative for provocation’s sake. Maybe the questioner could stick to Trump-supporting jewelry on a scale similar to those Kamala pins or use a Trump-supporting coffee mug.

A Fatuous Argument

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The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week concerning a Tennessee law that bans transgender medical procedures for minors. In the course of that session, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made this argument favoring striking the law:

…racial classifications and inconsistencies. I’m thinking in particular about Loving v Virginia [which struck, on 14th Amendment grounds State laws banning interracial marriage], and I’m wondering whether you thought about the parallels, because I see one as to how this statute operates and how the anti-miscegenation statutes in Virginia operated.

This is just Brown Jackson’s attempt to claim a discrimination based on sex, which would make the law harder to sustain. The argument that the Tennessee ban is based on sex discrimination is risible on its face, since regardless of the life style chosen or the drugs and surgeries engaged in to support that life style, the individual remains the male or female he or she was conceived as all those months prior to birth.

Her false equivalence is silly. Trending Politics‘ Collin Rugg:

Yes, because banning a white person from marrying a black person is the same thing as cutting off a 10-year-old’s gen*tals.

Keep in mind, though, that this is the same woman who, at her confirmation hearing, was completely unable to say what a woman is.

Biden Administration Newspeak Dictionary in Action

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The Supreme Court is hearing, this week, the Progressive-Democrat Biden administration’s argument that the Tennessee law (and by extension the similar laws of nearly half the States of our Union) that prohibits the administration of

medical treatments to minors if the purpose is to enable a gender transition or to address “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity[]”

is somehow unconstitutional. The case to watch is US v Skrmetti.

The administration’s case is centered on this:

A teenager whose sex assigned at birth is male can be prescribed testosterone to conform to a male gender identity, but a teenager assigned female at birth cannot.

The lawyers arguing for this go on to insist that this represents a violation of our Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

No.

Babies aren’t assigned anything at birth. They are born with the characteristics they gained at egg fertilization; in the present case their male or female sex characteristic is demonstrated by their possessing XY chromosomes or XX chromosomes from that moment.

It’s illustrative of the hypocrisy of this administration that so many members chant “follow the science” and then proceed to ignore it. “Follow the science” to these worthies plainly is just a voodooist’s incantation cynically applied for street cred with the far left of our society.

Far more importantly, though, this use of the administration’s Newspeak Dictionary in lieu of a dictionary of American English is nakedly dishonest. This use of the administration’s Newspeak Dictionary in lieu of the Supreme Court’s long-standing (since Lynch v Alworth-Stephens Co) injunction to use the plain, obvious, and rational meaning is naked contempt for our court system.

The Tennessee law needs to be upheld in no uncertain terms, and these administration lawyers need to be severely sanctioned for their insistence on bringing this frivolous case and for their contempt of court premise.

“UCLA pleads for legal immunity….”

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This is a measure of how deeply embedded antisemitism bigotry is in the managers running UCLA. They ordered, according to the charges in the case in which they demand immunity, exclusion zones that barred Jewish students from certain areas of the UCLA campus—areas which granted antisemitic protestors and terrorist supporters proclaiming Israeli genocide—veto authority over who could enter areas of campus those protestors occupied.

The defendants in the case already have had an injunction issued against them barring such actions and barring the defendants’ proclaiming programs that certain groups could have but that barred other groups from having similar or participating in the former. The presiding judge in that injunction opened his order with this [emphasis in the original]:

In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.

This is the bigotry from which these personages demand their immunity. They rationalize their demand to be excused from their bigotry with this:

“There was no blueprint for how to respond to a protest encampment,” and UCLA used de-escalation in the context of “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving” situations, which justifies qualified immunity….

Right. We’re supposed to believe that the folks at the pinnacle of this major university’s management team had themselves to be told what to do before they acted. At the very least, that’s their confession that they’re unfit for the positions and should be fired for cause.

And they need to be sanctioned monetarily for their actions in furtherance of their bigotry along with any education-related licenses they may hold rescinded with prejudice.

Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.