Trump gay LGBT
© ReutersRepublican presidential nominee Donald Trump holds up a rainbow flag with “LGBTs for TRUMP” written on it at a campaign rally in Greeley, Colorado, U.S. October 30, 2016
For all the hullabaloo regarding Trump's nomination for the Supreme Court, one would be forgiven for thinking that Dems actually care about law and order

While Lisa Page dodges a House-issued subpoena to testify before Congress, US media is up in arms over Trump's -shock- Congressional Supreme Court nominee. If we're to believe CNN, Trump's pick for the Supreme Court will, if confirmed, upend life as we know it. As that failing fake news garbage reported, "Women's rights, gay rights, voting rights, the right to use contraceptives -- so much of modern life -- could be upended."

Hyperbole aside, they're right about one thing: much of what passes for 'values' and 'culture' in modern life - better termed postmodern life - is taking a good, wholesome beating. The appointment of yet one more conservative on the Supreme Court is just the latest punch in the culture wars.

Gay Rights

In 2017 the media was alleging that there was something perverse about Donald Trump's Justice Department (DOJ) argument that the Civil Rights Act does not protect LGBTQ Americans from being fired because of their sexual orientation. A typical report began, "Why does President Donald Trump care about what gay people do in the bedroom?"

A simple bit of investigation would reveal to these 'reporters' that this is not solely a Trump Administration issue. It's an issue that dates back to the the initial passage of the Civil Rights Act. The 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th Circuit Courts have each held that sexual orientation is not a protected right under Title VII. As the DOJ stated in 2017,
"The sole question here is whether, as a matter of law, Title VII reaches sexual orientation discrimination," the department's brief said. "It does not, as has been settled for decades. Any efforts to amend Title VII's scope should be directed to Congress rather than the courts."
So what's wrong with them - are they fascists? No, they're just practicing the law in the boring, rational way it's ordinarily practiced.

Signed by LBJ on July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act did not originally include language protecting 'gay rights'. Rather, it states that no one shall be discriminated against in either private or public sector employment "because of... race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." The word sex was not included until two days after the bill's passage, when the National Women's Party managed to have Representative Howard Smith include this language in the bill. Notice, however, that there are no L's, B's, G's or T's. Only biological sex.

By the 1980s courts were still arguing that sex, as defined by the legislation, protected people from discrimination based on their sex - male or female. It did not protect individuals based on their sexual orientation. One transsexual fired after gender reassignment surgery found her case dismissed because one court argued that, "although cruel, [such actions] are not made illegal by Title VII." Right or wrong, the law is the law. It's up to legislators to make the necessary changes.

But the American legal system as a whole has not been immune to the kind of postmodernist 'thinking' that has infected the rest of society. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, 'critical theorists' marched through the institutions; for them law, like all other aspects of reality, is an irrational 'reproduction of power relationships'. Lawyers from such traditions saw their job not as interpreting the law, but in doing politics - specifically 'the politics of the oppressed'.

Fast-forward to 2005, to the case of Philip/Phelicia Barnes, a male-to-female transsexual who was awarded more than $320,000 for being denied a position as Sergeant on the Cincinatti police force due to 'discrimination based on sex'. The police squad's crime? They deemed s/he didn't have command presence due to wearing a French manicure, arched eyebrows, using lipstick, and being caught by the vice squad in otherwise embarrassing situations while living as a woman off-duty.

Prosecutors argued that the concept of 'command presence' was a discriminatory stereotype. Thus the court found that the city kept Barnes from being promoted because he violated 'sex stereotypes' and was, therefore, protected by Title VII. However, as a Trump Administration lawyer argues,
"Employers under Title VII are permitted to consider employees' out-of-work sexual conduct," Mooppan told the judges. "There is a common sense, intuitive difference between sex and sexual orientation."
Yes indeed, there is an undeniable, common sense difference between the two. Reading anything more into the legislation is dangerous. As Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has said, "If judges were secret legislators, declaring not what the law is, but what they would like it to be, the very idea of government by the people and for the people would be at risk." With the drift of the Left towards the acceptance of literally any sexual preference as an 'orientation' one gets an inkling there's a reason legislators don't want to be explicit about what is and what is not protected under Title VII.

Ever since the 1980s there has been a growing movement among conservative lawyers to reverse this tide and return to a system based on tradition and a dose of common sense. Read the Daily Beast and you will find that Brett Kavanaugh is a member of this evil, fascist 'conspiracy' otherwise known as the Federalist Society. Founded in 1982 the Federalist Society was dedicated to the idea that "The state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be."

It's from a list of lawyers provided by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation that Trump made Brett Kavanaugh his pick, giving the Federalist Society and conservatives more broadly a 5-4 controlling factor of the court if he's accepted. Kavanaugh is stepping into the Supreme Court at a critical moment in which this longstanding debate may be coming to a head. As usual, it's depicted as another sign of 'Right-wing Fascism'. But it's the legal process, pure and simple.

Conclusion

We all know by now that there's a legal system for The Swamp, and then there's the legal system for the rest of us. The treatment of Hillary Clinton by the DOJ and FBI as opposed to the treatment of Trump and his associates by the same parties is no laughing matter. If there should be real public outcry over the state of the legal system, it should concern this disparity. However, hysteria has reduced this debate to 'moral' issues like abortion and gay rights, when, given widespread social acceptance of both, such 'issues' turn out to be insubstantial at best, pure party propaganda at worst.

As we discussed in our show last week, (The Truth Perspective: 'And Then They Came for the Psychologists: Why SJWs Can't Stand Science'), Ivan Pavlov's theory of Transmarginal Inhibition can account for much of the hysteria we see today. In the early phases of debilitating, chronic stress the organism responds by simply being 'too tired to care'. In the later phases strong stimuli (like the actual facts of the matter) produce little to no effects while weak stimuli (lies like 'Trump is Hitler') produce violent effects. Making mountains out of molehills, like Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court, seem to be the symptoms of this ongoing process which, if unchecked by more calm-minded and strategic individuals, can lead to violent insurrection.