The "Moderate" Governor of Colorado, Championed by NeverTrump as a Solid Conservative-Leaning Libertarian, Mandates That All Coloradans Will Be Forced to Pay for the Sex Change Surgeries of Children (and All Others)

So moderate.

Say, have any of you begun to suspect that NeverTrump was always a gaggle of mediocre liberals who realized they could infiltrate the GOP and make a lot of money?

Erin for Parental Rights @Erin4Parents

Wow. @GovofCO just signed a bill forcing all of us to pay for elective transgender-affirming procedure... this bill even includes a slush fund to circumvent Medicaid no longer covering this.

Women of CO: you will all now be paying for men's breast implants, laser hair removal and skin tightening. But your insurance will NOT cover any of these elective procedures for you. Let that sink in.

*1309 also takes testosterone off the drug tracking program. So the wrong-sex hormones you're paying for for children will be secret.

That post here, linking Polis' tyrannical dictate. Note that there will be zero district court judges who rule against his abrogation of free speech rights.

He now claims it's a crime to "deadname" or "misgender" people.

And the district court judges will all say "Yup, this is The Law now."

In upsetting news, a Massachusetts school (of course) encouraged students to wear clothing making the political statement that there are 57 genders.

When one student wore a t-shirt proclaiming "There are 2 genders," the school disciplined him. Then the student wore a t-shirt saying "There are [censored] genders," and the school disciplined him again.

Only two members of the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. It takes four justices to vote to hear a case (this is called "granting certiorari," or granting the request to hear a case the Court has discretion to hear, or not hear.

Apparently the Federalist Society's picks of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Roberts all refused to hear the case, allowing the lower appeals court's ruling that schools may encourage students to endorse one political message, and forbid them from endorsing another, to stand.

Just the News:

Parents appeal censorship of "XX" wristbands at girls' soccer games to same appeals court SCOTUS refused to review, which upheld ban on gender-critical shirt as "reasonably interpreted to demean" a "deeply rooted" identity.

...

The high court Tuesday turned away pleas from those advocates and Republican state attorneys general to hear and reverse the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against Liam Morrison, upholding his Massachusetts middle school's ban on wearing shirts that read "there are only two genders" and, after his first punishment, "there are only censored genders."

First Circuit Chief Judge David Barron -- previously a Justice Department lawyer known for secretly advising the president who later nominated him that Barack Obama could legally kill Americans by drone strike -- had portrayed the issue as a matter of judicial deference.

...

ADF Vice President of U.S. Litigation David Cortman noted that Nichols Middle School (NMS), which Morrison attended when his parents sued on his behalf, "actively promotes its view about gender through posters and 'Pride' events" and encourages students to wear clothing in alignment with its views but not those opposed, a content-based restriction.

"It is unfortunate the Supreme Court passed on this opportunity to reaffirm and clarify" that the Tinker "rule against viewpoint discrimination fully applies in public schools," Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Chief Counsel Robert Corn-Revere, who supported Morrison in a friend-of-the-court brief, wrote in an email.

Morrison's case "provided a good vehicle for addressing that question," he said.

The 1st Circuit, which lacks a single Republican presidential nominee, has a new chance to legally distinguish restrictions on gender-critical speech between minors and adults.

...

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a lengthy dissent against the denial of Morrison's case joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, who disagrees with the Vietnam War-era Tinker precedent allegedly ignored by the Boston-based appeals court but said it's "binding precedent that lower courts must faithfully apply" until SCOTUS junks it.

The high court's inaction has stripped "thousands" of students in public schools of their "full panoply of First Amendment rights" in the 1st Circuit's jurisdiction of Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire, and left lower courts "confused on how to manage the tension between students' rights and schools' obligations," Alito wrote.

The 1st Circuit "employed a vague, permissive, and jargon-laden rule that departed from the standard this Court adopted in" Tinker pertaining to antiwar armbands, the justice said.

He was baffled that the court "repeatedly emphasized" Morrison's age -- 12 when the suit was filed -- as justification to exempt him from the 1969 precedent in favor of 13-year-old Mary Beth Tinker as well as older teenagers.

"If a school sees fit to instruct students of a certain age on a social issue like LGBTQ+ rights or gender identity, then the school must tolerate dissenting student speech on those issues," Alito wrote. "If anything, viewpoint discrimination in the lower grades is more objectionable because young children are more impressionable and thus more susceptible to indoctrination."

...

Alito reminded the appeals court "the presumption against viewpoint discrimination is of such importance to our constitutional order that we have even applied it to categories of speech -- like fighting words -- that do not enjoy full First Amendment protection," such that Congress could not ban "only those fighting words directed toward Protestants."

Connecting these two stories: Jennifer Sey's clothing company, which produces shirts championing biological sex over claimed subjective "gender," is suing Colorado for
essentially outlawing her company by stripping Americans of their free speech rights to say that biological sex is real.

Colorado's new law prohibiting so-called deadnaming and misgendering transgender people in places of public accommodation could be challenged on any number of First Amendment grounds, even without the child custody provisions hastily stripped from the bill to address concerns by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis and some LGBTQ groups.

But the first major test of HB 25-1312, signed by Polis without a statement or ceremony, comes from an athletic wear company that markets itself as "the only brand standing for women's sports" and sells subscriptions to its own women-only running club.

XX-XY Athletics, founded by former world-class gymnast Jennifer Sey last year, sued the Colorado Civil Rights Division, Colorado Civil Rights Commission and Attorney General Phil Weiser to protect its continued ability to identify "men and boys who compete in women's sports" by given names and biologically accurate pronouns in its marketing.

Because the amendments to the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act guarantee the use of a "chosen name" and the choice of how to be addressed in public accommodations and advertising, "XX-XY Athletics can no longer speak the truth in pursuit of its mission" and "call men, men" in its ads and customer interactions, the lawsuit says.

"Colorado officials have not hesitated to go after businesses for violating" previous CADA iterations, "torching the First Amendment in the process," the brand alleged, noting the Supreme Court sided with Jack Phillips and Lorie Smith when regulators targeted them for refusing to celebrate same-sex marriage in custom cakes and websites.

XX-XY faces imminent "cease-and-desist orders, expensive investigations, hearings, and civil and criminal penalties" if it keeps speaking "its desired message and views," the suit says.

posted by Ace at 01:20 PM

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