Reporters walking to the Senate Judiciary Committee for the first round of Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings must have wondered if they were lost. There were no protestors, no “handmaidens,” no overwhelming presence of Capitol Police. Four years ago, in the disgrace that was Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing, there were 22 arrests before 11 a.m. Two years later, on Amy Coney Barrett’s first day, 21 people were handcuffed before the session even started. Without the Left’s screaming, tantrums, and constant disruptions against a Republican nominee, it hardly feels like a modern Supreme Court confirmation debate.
“We’re tired of it,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said about the treatment of past Republican nominees. Turning to the judge affectionately dubbed KBJ, he promised, “It’s not going to happen to you.” And several hours into the questioning, it hasn’t. Jackson is getting the respect that Kavanaugh and Barrett deserved. “It just appalls me,” Graham went on, “that we can have such a system in America that if a conservative woman wants to stand out and say, ‘I love my family’ — just as much as you love yours — and [her] faith means just as much to [her] as it does you, that all of the sudden they’re some kind of weirdo…” If she were an African-American conservative, he assured her, she would be “fair game” to have her “life turned upside down, to be filibustered” — no matter how qualified she may be.
But then, that’s the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party. There’s one standard for the Right, and one standard for the Left. The norm ought to be civility and open debate, Andrew McCarthy agrees — not character assassination. “Unless and until (a) Democrats end that destructive practice and (b) we arrive at a broad bipartisan agreement about the proper role of judges, it is not possible to have a consensus that intelligent, competent people of truly excellent character should be confirmed.”
For now, it seems, character isn’t the issue — judicial philosophy is. In several exchanges, Jackson seemed to be toeing the White House line on everything from life to transgenderism. When Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked her to define what a “woman” is, she replied, “I can’t.” Blackburn looked at her as if she didn’t hear correctly. “You can’t?” “I can’t,” Jackson insisted. “Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.” Stunned, the senator fired back, “The meaning of the word ‘woman’ is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?” Jackson answered, “Senator, in my work as a judge, what I do is address disputes. If there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments, and I look at the law — and I decide.”
Of course, as most Americans would say, you shouldn’t need to look at the law to know what a woman is. But Jackson’s failure to answer such a basic question should give Republicans plenty of pause about the ways she would resolve the heated debate over transgenderism. “It also shows how Democratic identity politics works in hilariously self-contradictory ways,” Kyle Smith pointed out. “Jackson was nominated because she is a black woman in a move that Democrats thought would be a grand slam for identity politics, but meanwhile Democrats can’t define what either of those identities actually means…”
On abortion, she was similarly vague. “When does life begin, in your opinion?” Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) asked. The judge answered, “Senator, I don’t know. I have personal religious and otherwise beliefs that have nothing to do with the law, in terms of when life begins.” When she’s ruling on cases, Jackson added, she sets those views aside. Kennedy tried a different approach, inquiring if Jackson believes equal protection of the law applies to human beings. “I actually don’t know the answer to that question,” the nominee told him. “I’m sorry.” Not as sorry as the millions of unborn humans who thought that truth was “self-evident.”
For Christians, one of the more disquieting moments came when Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) invoked the Obergefell ruling, which invented a right to same-sex marriage in 2015. He asked Jackson if Americans should be able to embrace natural marriage as a matter of religious freedom. “Well, senator, that is the nature of a right,” the nominee responded. “When there is a right, it means that there are limitations on regulation even if it means people are regulating pursuant to their sincerely held religious beliefs.”
To FRC’s Katherine Beck Johnson, that answer spelled trouble. “She didn’t seem to even recognize that there’s a tension between the rightly-held religious belief that marriage is between a man and a woman versus the Obergefell decision handed down by the Supreme Court. There certainly is a tension, and that tension is being manifested every day in our country.” She pointed to cases where Christians are being forced to do things like bake cakes for same-sex weddings.
The freedom of religion has been a “deeply and sincerely held right” for much longer than this new Obergefell decision, Johnson argued. “And the fact that she only wanted to address that [same-sex marriage] is a right, and [no] deeply-held religious view can infringe upon that [shows that] she does not even remotely understand the views of millions of Americans…”
HD Editor’s Note: Too Risky To Define A Woman?
David Closson, the Director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, responded in a recent article to Jackson’s refusal to define the word “woman.”
“The exchange between Blackburn and Jackson is a massive cultural moment and reflects how deeply gender identity ideology has taken root in our national subconscious,” he wrote. “In short, those pushing gender identity ideology that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago have been so successful in promoting their views that it is now deemed too risky to define a woman as an adult biological female.”
“The promotion and acceptance of transgender ideology have accelerated the rampant gender confusion in our nation, and the events of the past few weeks underscore just how successful LGBTQ activists have been in converting the news media, Big Tech, the business community, and now, apparently, the judicial community, to their cause,” Closson wrote. “Just within the past few weeks, we’ve seen a biological male crowned an NCAA champion in women’s swimming and USA Today declare Rachael Levine, a biological male serving in the Biden administration, as one of the newspaper’s ‘Women of the Year.'”
“But even though there have been several stories in the news lately featuring those who identify as transgender, it is remarkable that someone nominated to the nation’s highest court is unwilling to define the word ‘woman,'” he noted. “It raises the question of how Americans can trust someone to faithfully interpret the U.S. Constitution and apply the nation’s laws who lacks the courage to simply state biological facts. Nevertheless, here we are.”
“It would be ludicrous to think that Judge Jackson does not know what a woman is,” the FRC Director underscored. “Judge Jackson is a two-time Ivy League graduate. She has served on the federal judiciary for nearly a decade and has been seated on the nation’s second-most important court for almost a year. Without a doubt, Judge Jackson is highly intelligent. But her unwillingness to answer Sen. Blackburn’s question is a foreboding sign that gender identity ideology not only holds tremendous sway in the Democratic Party but has also taken hold in parts of the legal profession. Deference to partisan politics has no place in the judiciary.”
“President Biden promised to nominate a black woman to the nation’s highest court, and Judge Jackson meets both of those criteria. But the judge’s own refusal to define the word ‘woman’ during her confirmation hearing is disturbing because it suggests an accommodation to a postmodern worldview unable to assert basic truths about human embodiment,” he continued. “Judge Jackson is a woman, and it shouldn’t be controversial to state this fact. Even those who may not agree with Judge Jackson’s judicial philosophy can acknowledge that Jackson’s nomination is historic and that many African American women are especially excited about her appointment. But the fact that the nominee herself cannot confidently answer a straightforward question that contradicts the far Left’s radical gender identity ideology is a sad and revealing commentary on the times.”
“You don’t need to be a veterinarian to define what a cat is, a mechanic to define what a car is, a florist to define what a flower is, or a biologist to define what a woman is,” he further wrote. “But increasingly, you do need courage and a willingness to contradict the misguided zeitgeist of the age.”
Ken Ham, Founder and CEO of Answers In Genesis, pin pointed the problem when he explained that a rejection of God’s Word always leads to “utter foolishness.”
“For years I’ve been warning in my talks that as people, leaders, education systems, and the culture in general reject the absolute authority of God’s Word, we’ll find ‘anything goes’ as far as people’s worldview/morality,” Ham explained. “Of course, when ‘anything goes,’ it means anything except the absolutes of Christianity—which is what we see increasingly happening. Rejecting God’s Word will lead to utter foolishness and people will be subjective and illogical.”
