"Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde, est en droit de vous rendre injuste."1
[Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.]
--François-Marie Arouet ("Voltaire")
"‘If I should call a sheep’s tail a leg, how many legs would it have? [O]nly four; for my calling the tail a leg would not make it so.’"
--Abraham Lincoln (attributed)
In the Senate confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Tuesday, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked Judge Jackson “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” and Jackson’s reply was “Can I provide a definition? No. I can’t, not in this context… I’m not a biologist.”
Leaving aside what exactly Judge Jackson means by “context” here, and the implication that she is presumably able to provide a definition of “woman” in a different “context,” Sen. Blackburn elicited an answer that would certainly seem bizarre to most ordinary viewers.
There is such a thing in the law of evidence as "judicial notice," which is specifically the type of information that ordinary people have which doesn't have to be proved via expert witnesses. This concept exists primarily for the efficiency of the court system, so that the parties appearing before a judge don't have to keep having to establish first principles.
The court should be able to take judicial notice of basic facts, such as "women exist" and "men exist."
A followup to that exchange with Sen. Blackburn could be something like:
"Judge Jackson, are you saying that the meaning of the word ‘woman’ is something which requires expert witnesses to understand in a court of law?"
It's a radical notion that the law would not recognize basic differences between men and women, and certainly not the role of a judge to abolish those distinctions by pretense that they don't exist. Nor is it really a judge’s job to establish the definitions of such basic concepts, which already exist outside of the “context” of law. If, as a society, we're going to abolish the distinction between men and women under the law, it should occur through the legislative process, and not by judicial fiat "constitutionalizing" yet another policy that couldn't be implemented politically.
I expect that, once done with the "transgender" project, the next frontier of "equality" will likely be in abolishing the "artificial distinction" between adults and children under the law ...it's "age discrimination" after all.
It's rather obvious why some people would like to do so.
The next question Sen. Blackburn could ask is whether the prospective justice believes that the law should recognize that adults and children are different.
(H/T to @BirdDog@socialquodverum.com for starting the thread there that became this post.)
Often loosely translated into English as "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."