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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:
The outcome was more or less decided by the threshold question: which type of review applies? There are 3 options:
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:
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.
I agree with @gattsuru and @ArjinFerman here. This is not a major victory for the red tribe, or a major loss for the blue. It's probably valuable, politically, for Republican politicians to be able to say to their base both that this is a win for "state's rights" and a win against "the trans agenda." I expect red states to increasingly adopt anti-hormone and anti-puberty-blocker legislation, and blue states to explicitly protect it, and probably we will also start seeing "trans your kids by mail" services not unlike what we have with abortion. So the victory will be mostly symbolic (which may count for something, but may not).
It's worth noting that Kagan, though she agreed on heightened scrutiny, declined to join the Court's low-IQ wing to assert that also the law failed under heightened scrutiny. Once again she shows herself to be, by a wide margin, the most competent jurist on the Court's left wing.
It's also worth noting that this is not quite correct regarding intermediate scrutiny:
Intermediate scrutiny applies to laws that discriminate on the basis of sex. Merely containing classifications is not sufficient. What's the difference? Well, the minority tries to claim that there's no difference; the law mentions sex, therefore the law is about sex, therefore intermediate scrutiny. But the majority points out that there are many laws obviously dealing with sex, that do not warrant intermediate scrutiny. The most obvious, of course, is any law dealing with pregnancy. Only women (sexually mature human females) can get pregnant. Every law dealing with the classification of "pregnant" contains a sex-based classification. But the discrimination in such laws is grounded in a medical status (pregnancy) rather than in sex. In this case, the discrimination is based on age (the state is denying both minor males and minor females cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers) and medical status.
Incidentally, this is why the late Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell is and has always been such a mess. Laws denying males the right to marry males don't discriminate on the basis of sex because everyone has the right to marry someone of the opposite sex. No one was being denied the right to marry on the basis of sex (any gay person could legally marry someone of the opposite sex...), but on the status of not being part of a consenting heterosexual dyad. What the left wanted out of that case was for intermediate (or even strict!) scrutiny to be applied to sexuality, which is obviously a different status than sex. But Kennedy didn't write the opinion that way (he didn't use "scrutiny" analysis at all, instead using history-and-tradition, which is transparently nonsense). Even post-Bostock, sexuality still hasn't been formally adopted by the Supreme Court as a "suspect class."
Despite the utterly bizarre attempt by Biden and Harris to declare the "Equal Rights Amendment" passed (how was he not called an attempted dictator for that?), the fact is that even "heightened scrutiny" on sex is utterly without grounding in the Constitution of the United States. Which brings us back to Skrmetti: a real win for conservatives here would have been a majority declaration that sex and gender are not suspect classifications at all, that sex and gender relevant regulation all belongs in the "rational basis" bin.
Never going to happen, I know. But that's what an unqualified victory would look like, here. This decision ain't it.
Is this really necessary? Presumably the reason they're low-IQ is because you disagree with their reasoning, and not because you have access to information that hasn't been made public. As much as I'd like to, there's a reason I don't refer to Trump as the moron-in-chief or whatever.
I often disagree with Kagan, but she's clearly not an idiot. Sotomayor and Jackson appear to actually be of noticeably below average intelligence within the profession, and certainly among appellate justices. Jackson in particular told us everything we needed to know about her intelligence when she asked, "what is a woman?" Tribe's characterization of Sotomayor (linked in this thread) as "not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is" is also widely shared by people who "have access to information that hasn't been made public," as you put it.
To be quite clear: this is not, at all, about substantive disagreement (I also regard Kavanaugh as of sub-par intelligence for a SCOTUS justice). I don't say they're low-IQ to boo-outgroup them; Kagan is definitely my outgroup. Sotomayor and Jackson are dim bulbs. I'm not evaluating their politics, I'm evaluating their apparent intelligence, and I find it noticeably and objectionably lacking.
If you read Tribe's comments in context it's clear that he's referring to her having a certain arrogance where she thinks she'll be able to persuade conservatives where she's more likely to put them off. It was more a comment about her personality than her intelligence, and why Kagan would be better in the role of Kennedy-influencer. In any event, Tribe later said that he was proven wrong. As for Jackson, she didn't ask that question, she gave a non-answer to a gotcha posed by Marsha Blackburn, who appeared less interested in determining Jackson's qualifications or judicial philosophy than in going on a rant about Lia Thomas and talking about how progressive education led to mind rot. Seriously, how was she supposed to answer? What could she have possibly said that would have satisfied Ms. Blackburn and earned her vote? From Lindsey Graham's questions about her faith to the softballs Democrats were lobbing, the whole thing was a dog and pony show, everyone knew this going in, and she was given specific preparation to not answer any questions if she could help it. Yeah, she gave an idiotic answer, but it was an idiotic question.
Anyway, the reason for my comment wasn't to specifically say that you were engaging in boo-outgroup, just that it comes across as below the standards of this board to imply that someone who has risen to the rank of Supreme Court Justice acts the way they do because of low intellectual capacity. I've been here since 2017 and I have yet to be modded once. I rarely report comments, though I also get pissed off when troublemakers decide to argue with the mods. Whenever I see someone people tying themselves in knots trying to explain and/or justify Trump's latest Outrage of the Week, I'm tempted to respond by simply saying that Trump is obviously too stupid to engage in anything approaching coherence and that his supporters, almost without exception, are too stupid to notice that he's incoherent, and that if you want to bemoan the decline of conservatives in academia then maybe it's time to consider that it isn't so much persecution as it is proof that conservative ideas are simply unappealing to anyone with half a brain.
Of course, I don't do this, and if I did I'd probably be reported on a bunch, and I'd probably be given some leeway at first because of my history here, but eventually patience would run thin and I'd have to start eating bans. And whoever reported me and the mods would be correct to smack me for it, because, despite the fact that I can point to all kinds of evidence supporting the idea that Trump and Trump supporters are generally all morons, that isn't really productive and isn't the kind of discourse I expect here. So when I see it coming from a mod it's disappointing, and when I see it trying to be justified on the grounds that Larry Tribe once said this and "Did you hear what she said to the Senate Judiciary Committee?" it makes me wonder if I should just say "Fuck It" and see what I can get away with. Unless, of course, you're telling me that I'm perfectly within the rules to do that, in which case I won't do it all the time, but you can count on me referring to Alito and Thomas as the "low IW wing" in the future.
This does not seem clear to me at all.
He's a partisan. I trust his unguarded opinion about someone whose status was in the moment unimportant to his tribe, above anything he said later in public when he was likely to be speaking more to save face or engage in "yay ingroup." I'm applying something like a Bayesian version of the "statements against interest" rule, I guess.
Sorry--looks like I dropped a word ("was") from that sentence, mea culpa. You are correct; she was asked "what is a woman" and her answer was "I'm not a biologist," which is a stupid answer even assuming she is a hardened partisan. Someone who believes "woman" means what trans advocates want it to mean ("a person who identifies as a woman"), should have answered in a way that would not imply that the answer was grounded in biology at all. Her answer wasn't just a pointless dodge, it was a bad dodge. If you think it would be more charitable to characterize her answer as a lie than as stupidity, like... okay? But that's not actually clear to me. (I also disagree that the question was a "gotcha." It's not a "gotcha" to ask someone a question that requires them to either admit to the force of biological reality, or speak lies and prevarications in service of one's ideological paymasters. But that is a different discussion I think.)
Two people can be idiots at the same time!
I am opposed (and increasingly opposed every passing year) to the deference shown the judiciary by lawyers, journalists, and the public. Specifically, you are probably familiar with attorneys being disciplined and sanctioned for impugning judicial integrity in court proceedings; I regard that as a blatant violation of the First Amendment. My experience with law practice and legal academia is that there is a prevalent attitude of deference to the judiciary, not only to its supposed impartiality, but to its competence. I think that is both mistaken and a little bit disgusting, especially as the judiciary has become increasingly professionalized. One does not "rise" to the rank of Supreme Court Justice, because these people are not above anyone. Especially when they are explicitly affirmative action selections. Even the brightest SCOTUS justices are approximately comparable to your typical tenured professor in an R1 university (except that university professors do more real, actual work than appellate justices, but again--different discussion). SCOTUS justices just are not that special--and even then, Jackson would not be a SCOTUS justice if she were a white man. Probably she would not even have been admitted to Harvard Law, though we don't know for sure because apparently it's "racist" to ask about her LSAT scores--even though legislatures often demand such information from judicial appointees. (Seriously, have you ever listened to a state legislator who graduated from Fly By Night Law with a 2.1 GPA harangue an appointee over going to State Law with a 160 LSAT? The chutzpah of elected officials really is something else!)
I think it's important to be able to discuss people's intelligence, not just in absolute terms but relative to the intelligence of others. I am not a blank slatist. Apparently you're not the one making them, but I know I have seen posts here discussing Trump's intelligence and mental functioning, and in the past those conversations were also had about Biden. "Trump seems to be showing himself less intelligent than past U.S. Presidents, and here is why..." is an argument I would identify as within bounds, provided the rest of the post were sufficiently backstopped, not needlessly inflammatory, etc.
Now--very importantly--generalizing that to the intellect of "his supporters, almost without exception" or to "conservatives" generally, would be out of bounds. Why? Because of the rule about focusing on specific individuals or groups rather than general ones. Arguing that a person is stupid, and providing evidence for why that is the best explanation of what they said or did (in particular, explaining how you are not using "stupid" as a stand-in for mere disagreement), is a very different thing than characterizing an entire group (especially, an ideological group) as stupid.
I also am of the view that Trump is not very smart (though he does sometimes seem to possess remarkable cunning). You're welcome to say it, when it seems relevant, and I doubt you'll get many reports for doing so (though I couldn't say for sure). Frankly, if you brought real evidence that "Trump supporters are generally all morons" that might be an interesting post! But it would require you to actually bring such evidence, and it would have to be pretty strong to counterbalance the "bring evidence in proportion" rule, and frankly "Trump supporters" are a sufficiently diverse group that you would be on very thin ice. But hey, we've had Jew-obsessed posters manage to get away with quite a lot of bullshit by adhering to the letter of the law; if you wanted to become a raving anti-Semite but with MAGA instead of Jews, that could be novel and interesting. (With apologies to my fellow mods for even suggesting such a thing.) Just notice that most of the raving anti-Semites here do eventually get themselves banned over it. Very few manage to keep the touch sufficiently light.
Those aren't the only grounds, those were just the easiest and most obvious grounds. Other posters have fleshed out other relevant concerns.
Now, having laid all of that out--I could have written that post better. Your concern is valid, and I will try to adjust accordingly. For whatever it is worth, I regarded my mention of the low-IQ wing as a bit of throwaway flavor text expressing my respect for Kagan (despite disagreeing with her). I really do have no respect at all for the intellects of Sotomayor or Jackson, based on many hours of reading and listening to their words, and I think that they are excellent examples of how the "affirmative action" approach to political appointments genuinely harms real institutions. But as that was not the point of my post, I probably should not have included it as a throwaway line, at minimum because it apparently created significant distraction from the actual substance of my post.
I... think that's a typo? Maybe? If not, you'll have to tell me what IW is. Assuming you mean IQ--I have seen many people on the Left criticize Thomas as an affirmative action appointment, and maybe that is true; partly I have a less firm opinion of him because he stayed quiet in oral arguments for so many years. But Alito is quite sharp, this just would not be a plausible criticism of him. If you wanted to plausibly identify a "low-IQ wing" on the right it would need to be, like, Kavanaugh and Thomas, and off the top of my head I can't think of any cases where they went in together against the rest of the conservatives.
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