This past week has seen triumph after triumph in the Supreme Court for us moral conservatives in our culture/class war against the progressive elite. But they got one thing wrong.
The ruling on college admissions fulfilled the prophesy of Sandra Day O'Connor 20 years ago that racial preference would no longer be necessary within 25 years. It is a relief from the sterile, tiring lament of racial victimization; it moves to heal the polarization and resentment, specifically among Asians; it renounces the paternalism and condescension that defines blacks as inferior and in need of remediation as well as the corrupting ideology of victimization and entitlement; it helps us to focus properly upon culture and class, the real vectors of marginalization.
The decision on loan forgiveness properly restrained an expansive executive and inhibited the privileging of white collar, upwardly mobile professionals over the blue collar working class.
The defense of the religious rights of the web designer against the LGBTQ militancy protects our right to live our religion and enhances a promising "live and let live" concordat.
The determination to raise the bar, in the post office case, in requiring a higher level of accommodation of the employer to the religious practices of workers is a small step in restraining the ravenous appetite of the unrestrained market.
All four rulings worked against progressive interests and favored the religious, blue collar underclass.
The Counterman vs. Colorado result was something else. Kagan, for a strong 7-2 majority including conservatives, found in favor of free speech and against a Colorado law that protects against threats, including on the internet. "Threat" means, of course, clear expression of intent to harm (e.g. "I will kill you.") But it also can mean less explicit patterns of harassment. The Colorado law took this to mean a pattern that an ordinary person would see as threatening. The Court overruled this in requiring a subjective proof that the defendant understood that the actions could be threatening and did them, not necessarily intending harm or threat, but recklessly.
In this they favored the subjective over the objective criteria. They protected freedom of speech over protection from harassment. In the specific case, the male virtual stalker (who has mental illness and has already served four years in prison) is vindicated in his free speech right over the young, female writer whose life was ruined by the intimidation.
This decision in favor of speech, an over-protectiveness of the aggressor and an indifference to the vulnerability of the victim, flows from the faux-feminism of the last half century that requires equivalence, in all things, between men and women and thereby denies the actual reality of femininity.
There is an overwhelming gender difference in this issue of threat. Men are far more prone to threaten; women are more vulnerable. It is like rape: men do it, women suffer it. There is no equality or uniformity here. Women suffer in athletics from trans-women; men have nothing to fear on that account. Women journalists in the locker rooms of NFL or NBA players is immodest, indecent, and unnatural; but it doesn't threaten these jocks. The more narcissistic of them may enjoy an exhibitionist thrill. Do we want the inverse: men in locker rooms and showers of female professionals? How about college athletes? They are themselves adults; and semi-professional.
In things regarding physical force and violence, women by nature require a preference, a protection. If men and women are treated the same, as dogmatic feminism dictates, the one who suffers is the woman.
Recall the controversial Kavanaugh nomination. The evidence for his guilt was weak. Male conservatives rallied to the presumption of innocence and were furious (Lindsay Graham) at the lynch mob dynamic. But fair-minded conservative women weighed that same evidence on a different scale. They identified, of course, with the alleged victim. They were too familiar with the frat-boy, egotistical, jock-type. Even if there were, say, a 40% possibility he had done the act as an intoxicated, adolescent prank and completely forgotten about it, that was enough to disqualify him. That is a sound logic. Very feminine.
Consider the now widespread practice of a paternity leave as equal to the maternity. To any culture or religion that has not been colonized by the ideology of androgyny this is patently ridiculous. But the logic of our market (not every market; not market in some pure, formal sense) dissolves male/female complementarity/asymmetry to reconfigure both as equivalent units of production and consumption. The actual consequence of such alleged "equity" is that women have a full work load but still carry most of the nurture and household care.
In this case Barrett and Thomas got it right. Thomas, always a strict constitutionalist, found the Court majority to be doing social policy (the realm of legislatures) and projecting it into the Constitution (shades of Roe and Obergefell!)
It is regrettable that the other conservatives (Roberts, Alito, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch) are inhaling the cultic air of gender equity and neutrality. In domains like "threat" the avoidance or transcendence of gender difference in effect victimizes the woman.
I have two grandmothers, one mother, six sisters, five daughters, twelve granddaughters, six aunts, five sisters-in-law, eighteen nieces. I am passionate and certain: there is a masculine reverence and tenderness due to the feminine, by its very nature. It is called honor, chivalry, virility. If this is not self-evident, there is nothing more I can say.
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