Trumpanzees Fling Poo, Hit Selves Yet Again!

There is just nothing — nothing, zero, nada — to say in favor of voting for Donald Trump. There wasn’t in 2016 (although at least it was understandable when Hillary was looming), and there certainly isn’t today. I have already dealt with all the usual excuses and rationalizations too many times to recite them again here. Today, however, yet another of the standard excuses is fully exposed for the folly it always was.

“But Gorsuch!” typically shout the Trumpanzees, when “But Hillary!” gets boring. 

Well, so much for that ruse. Gorsuch — who, as I have pointed out before, is merely the kind of run-of-the-mill “conservative judge” that any Republican president would have picked, and is therefore no special feather in Trump’s cap — has ruled with the Supreme Court’s progressive faction (along with that other brilliant Republican pick, John Roberts, of course) in deciding that the 1964 Civil Rights Act must be reinterpreted to include the outlawing of hiring decisions that “discriminate against” homosexuals and transgenders; in fact, he wrote the majority opinion. In other words, he has deliberately and superfluously broadened the scope of a law that was already, from its inception, a direct abrogation of the private property rights that ought to be a cornerstone of a republic built on a foundation of individual liberty.

Of course, Gorsuch, reputed by Republicans (notice I did not say “by conservatives,” because if we’re being honest it is obvious now that the two groups have nothing in common) to be a “textualist,” meaning one who believes a judge must only apply the law as written, without regard for the original intentions of the law’s creators, tries to argue in his majority opinion that this ruling is merely a literal reading of the Civil Rights Act, and therefore an open and shut case.

Here is the crux of his argument, as reported by his new best friends at The New York Times.

“When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest,” Justice Gorsuch wrote in the opening paragraphs of his opinion. “Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.”

His conclusion: “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.” And therefore, he said, the employer is in violation of the Civil Rights Act and the law. 

“…for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.”

With those cleverly understated words, Gorsuch has just led the way in establishing a Supreme Court precedent for reinterpreting “sex,” for legal purposes, to mean sexual preferences. In other words, he has just judicially determined that personal choice, rather than biological reality, is the primary determinant of a person’s sex, specifically for purposes of deciding what constitutes workplace discrimination.

With that nifty little sleight of hand — very much in the spirit of Chief Justice Roberts’ infamous defense of Obamacare — Gorsuch has just pushed America down the slippery slope, as we will discover over the next few years. That is, he has rendered it illegal, in principle, for a person to be fired from a job (or even refused one?) for any reason related to personal sexual proclivities. This will be tested again and again, and the precedent Gorsuch has helped to set will be cited again and again. It will henceforth be explicitly against the law in America for any employer to object to working alongside, let alone supporting with his own money, someone who engages in bestiality, sado-masochism, or other deviant practices that the employer finds grotesque or immoral. From now on, officially, an employer’s conscience and personal morality are completely divorced from his money (i.e., his property), which is to say that he must give his money to a person whom he regards as morally disagreeable in a fundamental regard, if that person happens to be “qualified for the job,” according to some abstract societal standard of “qualified.”

The idea that as a matter of casual common sense (which is how Gorsuch depicts it), homosexuality and transgenderism must be included under the general umbrella of “sex,” in the literal, textual sense of the Civil Rights Act, is an absurdity, and also a fairly strong indictment of the whole idea of judicial textualism. Strict textual interpretation which deliberately eschews any consideration of the lawmakers’ original intent is in effect carte blanche for judges in any given year to entirely reinvent a law by adhering to, or pretending to adhere to, a “literal” meaning of the law’s key term that in no way comports with the meaning that term had at the time of the law’s writing and passage. That is to say, textualism basically amounts to saying that each generation gets to decide what any given law means based on its own new linguistic customs and preferences. 

Today, in casual, illiterate usage, sexual preferences are sometimes confused, rhetorically, with “sex” in the sense of innate reproductive traits. Gorsuch has just used that casual and illiterate usage to justify ravaging a law that was already an abomination from the point of view of individual rights. 

“But Gorsuch!” Another lame excuse bites the dust for the poor Trumpanzees.