CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATIONS

Supreme Court decision of June 18, 2025:

The United States Constitution prohibits a State, like Tennessee, from taking any action to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” U.S. Const., Amendment XIV, Section 1. In United States v. Skrmetti  (US SupCt Slip Opinion of June 18, 2025), the United States Supreme Court held that Tennessee did not violate that prohibition when the State enacted a statute outlawing the medical treatment of minors for the purpose of changing or altering their sex. In a six-Justice majority Opinion, the Court found that Tennessee’s ban of all “gender-affirming” medical treatment of minors did not discriminate between minors who are male and minors who are female. Therefore, the Court held that the Tennessee statute did not deny individuals in either group of minors the “equal protection of the laws.” Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented, arguing that the Court used the wrong legal standard for reviewing the Constitutionality of sexual classifications in state laws.

Comment: Tennessee’s law against “gender-affirming” medical treatments of minors  forbids, among other things, the medical care of children by their conscientious parents and their highly trained, ethical physicians, for a medically recognized clinical condition, i.e., gender dysphoria. That condition may be inflicting significant harm on children suffering therefrom. When given a chance, I intend to vote against any of my legislative representatives who carelessly voted in favor of such uncaring legislation. However, I have to agree with the conclusion of the Supreme Court majority that non-discriminatory legislation, like Tennessee’s statute, does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment. Nor does it, in my opinion, violate any other provision of the federal Constitution that actually appears in that document. (The statute might be regarded as a violation of the famously oxymoronic “Substantive Due Process” account the Court has sometimes given of the 14^th Amendment.) Therefore, subject to a potential application of the questionable doctrine of “Substantive Due Process,” the Tennessee legislature was well within its power, as the elected representatives of the sovereign people of Tennessee, to enact a blunderbuss ban of all “gender-affirming” medical treatment of minors, into law, no matter how unwise, and even immoral some of us may believe such a ban to be.

Dan D. Rhea