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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34692 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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The U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Skrmetti.

In a 6-3 decision, it held that:

Tennessee’s law prohibiting certain medical treatments for transgender minors is not subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and satisfies rational basis review.

The outcome was more or less decided by the threshold question: which type of review applies? There are 3 options:

  1. laws that classify on the basis of race, alienage, or national origin trigger strict scrutiny and will pass constitutional muster “only if they are suitably tailored to serve a compelling state interest.”
  2. laws containing sex-based classifications to intermediate scrutiny, under which the State must show that the “classification serves important governmental objectives and that the discriminatory means employed are substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.”
  3. laws that classify in some other way, which only get rational basis review (almost impossible for a law to fail this one).

The Tennessee law at issue didn't fall into category 1, so the argument was about whether it was category 2 or 3. Per the Court:

Here, however, SB1 does not mask sex-based classifications. For reasons we have explained, the law does not prohibit conduct for one sex that it permits for the other. Under SB1, no minor may be administered puberty blockers or hormones to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence; minors of any sex may be administered puberty blockers or hormones for other purposes.

Once the law fell into category 3, that was pretty much that. There is some wiggling around to deal with Gorsuch's opinion in Bostock (which is what causes Alito to concur in parts of the opinion rather than the full thing since he dissented from Bostock), but Gorsuch joined this opinion in full, so apparently he didn't have a problem with the Court somewhat limiting Bostock here.

As one might expect, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented--they think intermediate scrutiny should apply. I cannot impartially comment on Sotomayor's dissent because most everything of hers that I read makes me think that Larry Tribe was, if anything, too kind in his remarks.

@gattsuru had a bit about them throwing Skrmetti to the red tribe to compensate for the betrayal on the gunz issue, and I can't unsee it. Not that I disagree with the decision, but I'd happily trade one for the other.

What was the betrayal on guns?

The Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment appeared to exist.

Federal Circuit Courts informed them that they were mistaken, and that the Second Amendment very definately did not exist.

The Supreme Court accepted this correction, and allowed the Circuit Court decisions to stand rather than vindicate the Consitutional Rights of United States Citizens as required by its own prior decisions.

People like me abandoned all hope in the Supreme Court as a viable institution, removing the Jury Box from the "four boxes" model of liberty, and precommitted to discount all future adversarial arguments made on the basis of Constitutional Rights.

The Second Amendment is no longer of interest to the Supreme Court and blue states are free to ban the most popular rifle in the nation without Court interference.

Snope v. Bonta.

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