During SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing Tuesday, Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked a very simple question.
“Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman?'”
Instead of providing one of the many common sense answers of what a woman is — or even rightly pointing out that the question had nothing to do with her judicial record — Jackson replied, “Can I provide a definition? No, I can’t.”
Jackson followed up with “I’m not a biologist.”
Jackson should be the last person in the country to feel as if she needs to bow down to leftist gender ideology. She has the backing of most Democratic politicians, numerous legal scholars and the mainstream media. She’ll most likely be a reliable liberal voice on the court for decades — she’s only 51.
Barring a few unhinged rants directed her way on Twitter, she most likely would have faced no consequences for answering Blackburn’s question honestly. She’s going to be the first black woman on the Supreme Court; the left has hyped up that talking point too much to boot her for answering a simple question about biology.
Jackson’s submission shows that anybody can be cowed into rejecting a basic scientific truth in the interest of radical ideology, and that has grave ramifications for ordinary Americans and the country as a whole.
Perhaps more importantly, as a Supreme Court justice, she is supposed to be above regular politics and relatively shielded from the court of public opinion. That’s how the Supreme Court is supposed to function, but Jackson revealed that she’s more concerned about kowtowing to ideologues than she is in upholding the integrity of the Judicial Branch.
Jackson basically has the entire Democratic establishment behind her. Despite all that power and all that clout, she still bowed down.
This begs the question: What is a regular American supposed to do when confronted by these ideas?
Radical gender ideology is becoming more and more ingrained in American society. Employers are incorporating it, along with critical race theory, into job training sessions. Twitter suspended The Babylon Bee for a joke about transgender Admiral Rachel Levine being named a “Woman of the Year” by USA Today. Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson were also censored for showing support for the Bee.
Soon the average American will face a choice. Willingly go along with untruths or speak out.
If someone has the courage to speak out, they may find themselves fired from their job, banned from social media for “hate speech,” ostracized by friends and relatives who want to avoid guilt by association and even accused by their own children of being horrible bigots.
Sure, parents who take a stand for their kids might end up on Fox News for a quick five-minute segment or overturn a local board’s decision to place borderline pornographic literature in school libraries, but the costs will heavily outweigh the benefits very soon.
Normal people have a fraction of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s connections and favor with the national media, and they have a lot more to lose than a Supreme Court nomination if they become a target of the woke mob.
It’s easier, and a lot less risky, to just go along with the program — many Americans already are. A YouGov poll released in September 2021 found that 37% of U.S. adults believe that a transgender woman is a woman and 38% think a transgender man is a man. Those numbers are far lower for issues like whether trans women can compete in women’s sports or use the women’s changing room. Teaching gender ideology to children is deeply unpopular, for now, but it’s still astonishing that almost 40% of the country chooses to believe that a man who identifies as a woman is a woman.
A concerted effort by the government, the media, academia and pop culture has convinced a massive portion of the U.S. population to ignore a fundamental biological fact and believe an out-and-out lie.
If they can convince Americans to embrace, often zealously so, the left’s blatantly unscientific gender ideology, it’s terrifying to think what other lies they can persuade the public to go along with.
The degradation of objective truth in favor of the ideological dogma of a fraction of the population should deeply disturb everyone — not just conservatives.
If the left can whittle away bit by bit our confidence in basic biological facts and browbeat any defenders or naysayers into whimpering submission, then we as a society have consigned ourselves to intellectual slavery and opened ourselves up to all sorts of evil.
Once nothing is objectively true, anything is permissible.
But it’s also a lie that we can’t do anything about it, that the arc of history is already set and there’s nothing that can be done to stop it. It’s a lie many conservatives have taken as gospel. But a line must be drawn somewhere, or else we’ll be forced to the edge of the cliff and eventually over it into the abyss.
Hayden Daniel is the opinion editor at the Daily Caller.