President Biden celebrated the confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson by telling reporters on the White House South Lawn, “America is a nation that can be defined in a single word….Asufutimaehaefutbuhwuhsh.” That proved to be a fitting foreshadowing for a tenure that has been defined by directionless verbosity, unintelligible standards, and the determined advancement of partisan dogma.
On Tuesday, Justice Jackson issued the lone dissent in an opinion overturning Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy.” The state law was broad enough to apply to any discussions acknowledging biological realities with gender-confused patients or contradicting the precept that the LGBTQIA+ socialization process is a cure without trade-offs.
The near-unanimous court ruled that the First Amendment barred this “egregious form of content discrimination,” which banned therapists from voicing “perspectives the State disfavors when speaking with consenting clients.”
Justice Jackson, however, described the defense of free speech as “puzzling,” which is unsurprising given her comprehension issues on the bench. In dissent, she embraced the State’s power to quash any professional speech that deviates from “current beliefs about the safety and efficacy of various medical treatments.” As Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledges in the opinion for the Court, that principle would allow the government to apply those malleable standards to “teaching or protesting,” but Jackson welcomes that threat.
Justice Jackson does not sidestep the issue; she embraces the muzzling in the name of “scientific consensus,” which she never considers could be incorrect. As support, she cites the American Psychological Association and the medical bureaucracy’s treatment of “conversion” as an “unattainable goal.” (Jackson notably omits that the former president of the American Psychological Association argued that therapy to change sexual orientation is legitimate for those who consented).
According to Jackson, the suppression of liberty is justified because “scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the anticipated harms from conversion therapy” should be avoided. Notwithstanding the widespread dissent on the issue, these were the same groups that embraced lockdowns, vaccine mandates, masking, and rioting in the Covid response. Their purported “consensus” was concocted through vast censorship efforts and smear campaigns.
Businesses shuttered, schools closed, and churches were banned as the facade of expertise became a bludgeon for ideological tyranny. The ostensible “consensus” maintained protections for riots, liquor stores, and abortion services, later culminating in the reshaping of our election process. And Justice Jackson wouldn’t have it any other way.
Her long-standing antipathy to free speech is ironic given her use of its liberty. She speaks 50 percent more than any of her colleagues and more than Justices Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas combined.
That allows her to make sweeping claims (such as comparing banning transgender mutilation surgeries to prohibitions on interracial marriage), and it provides a corpus of material to understand her opposition to the First Amendment.
In oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, which considered an injunction prohibiting the Biden administration from colluding to censor its critics, Jackson stated that her “biggest concern” was that the plaintiffs’ efforts may result in the “First Amendment hamstringing the Government,” apparently unaware that this is its very purpose.
More recently, in a hearing on Trump v. Slaughter, Jackson spoke longingly for bureaucratic supremacy, arguing that “experts” like “doctors and the economists and the Ph.D.s” should be immune from presidential control. That was in line with her tenure as a District Court Judge, during which she overturned four executive orders that sought to rein in the power of the nearly three million federal employees who effectively inhabit permanent jobs.
While Tuesday’s opinion was a victory for free speech and medical freedom, Justice Jackson’s opinion is not merely the ramblings of a radical ideologue. She is the mouthpiece for a large and powerful cohort that seeks to strip Americans of their autonomy in the name of “expert control.”
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