Supreme Court Rules That Free Speech Still Exists; Ketanji Brown Jackson Doesn't Understand

This should have been a 9-0 unanimous decision.

It has been the rule of the land since the founding of the Republic that the Constitution's stricture against passing "any law" limiting speech meant that no government, federal or state, could impose "viewpoint" restrictions on speech -- disfavoring or even criminalizing a specific view, argument, or belief.

Now, the Court long recognized that governments may impose "time, place, and manner" restrictions, especially on public gatherings and marches. For example, you can permit a march from 1pm to 3pm, so that the march does not interfere with rush hour traffic. You can tell the marchers they cannot walk in front of active garage entrances. You can tell the marchers they must be orderly and cannot use bullhorns that boost noise above, say, 100 decibels. That kind of thing.

But you cannot -- absolutely cannot -- pass a law or deny a permit to march based on your agreement with or disagreement with the speaker's speech. You can regulate speech as far as the time, place, and manner in which it is spoken, but you absolutely cannot regulate what that speech can say.

This was the rule controlling government regulation of free speech for 250 years, completely agreed to by all Supreme Court judges. Yes, lefty judges would of course put their thumbs on the scale and claim that some limits on speech they don't like -- like protesting outside abortion clinics -- were fair restrictions regarding "place" rather than viewpoint-based restrictions on pro-lifers, but everyone agreed on the framework for analyzing these cases.

Until today.

Gentlemen, you asked for a radical incompetent. I give you K. B. J.

The Court was nearly unanimous that Colorado cannot ban a therapist from counseling a patient to try to change his sexual orientation. Even "Wise Latina" Sotormayor joined the majority. Obama's Obamacare advisor, who cast a decisive vote on Obamacare, Elena Kagan joined the opinion.

But DEI Justice KBJ cast another lonely dissent, essentially repudiating 250 years of jurisprudence on free speech and declaring that sometimes, if the government really really really doesn't like speech and that speech is DoublePlus UnGood and Conservative, it can in fact ban speech based on what viewpoint it advances.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Colorado cannot enforce its so-called "conversion therapy" ban regarding conversations between therapists and minors, saying the law likely violates the First Amendment by allowing some viewpoints but not others.

In an 8--1 decision, the high court said the law favors one viewpoint by allowing therapists to affirm a minor's gender identity or sexual orientation, but not help them to change it if they want to.

The decision stemmed from a lawsuit brought by Kaley Chiles, a licensed Christian therapist, who argued her conversations with youth clients were a form of protected speech. The Colorado government had said the conversations amounted to professional conduct that the state was allowed to regulate.

...

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, saying the question before the high court was a "narrow one" and that Chiles did not seek to toss out the Colorado law but rather consider whether it could apply to therapy that was strictly conversational.

"The First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country," Gorsuch wrote. "It reflects instead a judgment that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for discovering truth. However well-intentioned, any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an 'egregious' assault on both of those commitments."

In the lone dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the majority "plays with fire in this case" and that she feared "the people of this country will get burned."

Ketanji Brown Jackson has now flipped completely on this question: In an earlier case, she argued that the state had zero power to ban transgender procedures for minors. The state just didn't have the power to intrude into medical advice and treatment, she proclaimed.

Now she takes the exact opposite position -- the state has All the Power to outlaw whatever medical advice it dislikes -- based not on law, precedent, or logic, but based simply on her leftwing extremist political bias that whatever gays and transgenders want, they should get, period, the law be damned.

Note that even the corrupt Kagan calls out Ketanji Brown Jackson in her concurrence:

("I don't understand" says Ketanji Brown Jackson.)

Let me make an analogy, which illustrates the trajectory of the left.

The leftwing propaganda media used to pretend. The leftwing propaganda media plainly favored Democrats -- and plainly favored Democrat constituent blocs like criminals, welfare recipients, women, transgenders, black and "brown" people, and Muslims -- but pretended to be applying neutral "rules" in its news coverage. They didn't intend to favor these groups out of political loyalty, you see, it was just that these completely neutral "rules" compelled them to cover these stories in this way. Now that was always a lie, because there are many contradictory "rules" they can apply in any case, and they choose which of these contradictory rules to apply according to their political bias. And then they deny the bias, lying that a "rule" forced their hand, without admitting that they chose that "rule" precisely because it would result in the outcome they desired. They are too cowardly and dishonest to admit they are simply political operators, so they used to spend a lot of time spamming out perfectly-disingenuous reasons why every single "journalistic" free choice they made just happened to favor the Democrat Party and its constituent blocks.

The truth has a leftwing bias, they began saying at the end of the Age of Pretending, before they transitioned to just blatantly promoting the interests of Democrats and Democrat-favored constituent blocs.

It began under GWB, with influential Democrats decrying "both sides" and "balanced" coverage, urging "journalists" to just proclaim One Side Is Right and One Side Is Evil, which, of course, they ultimately did. Now they just openly favor and cheerlead the Democrat Party and its constituent blocs, and openly smear Republicans and their constituent blocs (especially white people, males, straight men, and Christians) without any excuse or justification or any pretense whatsoever that they are applying neutral "rules" independent of their own partisan political agenda.

Very, very similarly: Leftwing judges used to pretend that they weren't deliberately and consciously favoring Democrats and Democrat constituent blocs but were instead merely applying neutral "rules" that dictated their decisions. True enough, this was all a lie -- just as it was with the media -- and they would choose which supposedly neutral rule would apply in each case to favor the parties they went into the case favoring. But still, they did pretend. They would blatantly mis-characterize and mis-categorize parties in a dispute to elevate the party they politically favored and disadvantaged the party they disfavored, but still, they pretended to be working within a legal framework of analysis.

But Ketanji Brown Jackson now does what leftwing "journalists" did before her -- she decides that all of this talk of "rules-based" decisionmaking is just a game that favors the Bad People, so the Good People should just throw out all rules and do what leftists have been doing forever anyway, just ruling in favor of the left's favored constituent groups and ignoring laws and logic to get to whatever outcome the leftists' "conscience" dictates.

Yes, she's stupid, and yes, she's chosen this theory of jurisprudence precisely because it rejects intellectual analysis and says "Just do whatever is in your stupid, corrupt communist heart."

But she is NOT an aberration. This is where the entire left is now, and all of the absurd decisions you see coming from leftwing judges are following this same theory of jurisprudence, that explicitly puts particular people -- politically favored people -- over principle, and political outcomes over logic and coherence.

No longer are we a nation of "laws not men." We are now a nation of particular "men" with specific Favored Identity Points, and the law must always be corrupted, distorted, perverted and twisted to deliver the outcomes favored by those with those Favored Identity Points.

And they're not even pretending to work within a system of objective rules any longer.

Update: Gorsuch mocked Justice DEI for claiming she wasn't really restricting the therapist's speech because she was allowed to sometimes speak or even "write papers."

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:33 PM

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