Opinion
By Jeff Childers
03-13-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your humble correspondent’s hiking muscle is throbbing after yesterday’s happy hikes up and down the raggedly awe-inspiring terrain in Zion park. We Floridians are adapted for flat terrain, happily beetling our way around a two-dimensional landscape. All of this up-and-down-going is a different matter altogether. On the other hand, we were quite well adapted to the seemingly endless queuing for the park shuttle since we grew up in theme park HQ.
I would like to thank Boulder City Family Dental, which on Monday quickly and effectively helped us with a dental emergency on a walk-in basis — and refused to let us pay them. Terrific folks, and please give them my regards if you’re ever in the area.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
👨⚖️ Yesterday, a wonky, technical parental rights case exposed the growing ideological rift between progressives and sane people and showed just how close the country is edging to judicial revolution. The Texas Tribune covered the story under the headline, “5th Circuit upholds Texas law requiring minors to obtain parental consent for contraception.”
In Deanda v. Becerra, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans upheld a Texas parental consent law, but stopped just short of resolving the real legal conflict. The Texas law they upheld bars federally-funded NGO’s and schools from handing out birth control drugs and other contraceptive products to kids like Skittles. Not without their parent’s permission, anyway.
Perhaps anticipating this case is headed toward the Supreme Court, the Fifth Circuit took its legal razor and finely shaved the legal issues. It separated HHS’s pre-2021 non-mandatory “guidance” from an October 2021 mandate. Both prohibited parental notification, but the rule has the force of federal law. As we will see, the court avoided taking on the rule, preferring to deal with the pre-2021 statute and the much simpler ‘guidance.’
Here’s how the court explained the two parts. Remember, “guidance” versus “rule”:
The HHS Secretary’s “longstanding guidance” to Title X grant recipients has been that they cannot require parental consent or even notify parents. “Specifically with respect to adolescents, courts have for decades recognized minors’ rights to receive confidential services under the Title X program.” The Secretary formalized this policy by promulgating a final rule in October 2021. While reiterating that, “to the extent practical, Title X projects shall encourage family participation,” the 2021 rule forbids grantees from requiring parental consent or notifying parents before or after a minor receives family planning services. 42 C.F.R. § 59.10(b).
It took eight pages of the opinion to deal with the government’s predictable arguments that the plaintiff lacked standing to bring the case since ‘no one was trying to give his kids contraceptives.’ But the court waved off all those arguments. The plaintiff is a Texas father with three daughters. Based on his Christian beliefs, he is teaching his daughters they should abstain from sex until marriage, and he doesn’t want their schools stuffing their purses with condoms. Since they all live in Texas, and Texas law requires contraceptive providers to first get parental consent, the Fifth easily found standing.
HHS Secretary Javier Becerra, getting dressed.
Next up was the government’s argument that Title X federally preempted — superseded or trumped — the Texas notification statute. The court looked at two parts: the plain language of Title X, and that HHS “guidance.” (Remember, it did not consider the 2021 rule. More on that in a minute.)
Title X’s statutory language “encouraged” minors to consider “family planning.” The feds argued this language preempted (overruled) Texas’ parental consent law. “Preemption” means that when a federal law and a state law conflict with each other, the federal law wins. In other words, HHS Secretary Becerra argued the federal law wipes the floor with the state law.
But the Fifth found there was no conflict at all between a federal law that explicitly “encourages” family planning, and a state law requiring parental consent — in fact, the court thought the parental consent language enhances the federal objective of ‘encouragement.’
That was the good news. But the Fifth carefully avoided ruling on the 2021 rule, and reversed a key part of the trial court’s decision. The trial court had found the 2021 rule forbidding parental notification was illegal. But the Fifth said the trial court never should have considered the 2021 rule, since the Secretary had issued the rule after the case was filed (a typical move by government in the face of litigation). The issue of whether the 2021 rule was constitutional was argued too late; it only came up in closing arguments. Thus the Fifth said it was not properly before the trial court and shouldn’t have been included in the decision.
It’s an odd result. Now the poor plaintiff must sue Becerra all over again, essentially copycatting his first case, but this time against the new 2021 rule and presumably focusing on the Constitutional issues.
On the bright side, we’d call it a “good sign” that the trial court has already held once that the Secretary’s 2021 rule violates parents’ Constitutional right to direct their children’s upbringing. And the Fifth studiously avoided giving any hints how it would decide that constitutional issue, leaving themselves plenty of room to support it the next time around. So the plaintiff’s pathway is paved to sue again, this time directly challenging the new rule.
A frustrating as it sounds, the Fifth’s half-and-half ruling still gave the vapors to the hyper-liberal Daily Beast, which literally labeled the decision “ominous”:
Curiously, as this case shows, the universe of parental-rights issues have now collided with the galaxy of liberal sexual-freedom issues. Progressives, unsatisfied with having achieved virtually unlimited legal license for adults to debauch themselves however they want, they are now coming for kids— and parents are inconveniently getting in the way.
In that sense, this case highlights a critical distinction between modern liberals and people free from mental illness. To the modern, progressive liberal, parents are harmful impediments to achieving important psycho-sexual social objectives, like teaching kids all about sex. But everyone else, everyone except progressives, think of parents as being proper gatekeepers, providing individualized care, discipline, and instruction, and knowing their own children better than anyone else.
That conflict became the irresolvable basis of the Fifth’s ruling. The federal government thinks the laws conflict with each other, because notifying parents interferes with the objective of encouraging family planning. But the conservative jurists on the Fifth Circuit saw it the opposite way: involving parents through notification was the best way to “encourage” family planning.
Another way to look at it is, to everyone except progressives, it is obvious that even bad parents are better than no parents at all. But vexed progressives view parents as useless leftovers, mysterious organs that millions of years ago had some baffling purpose but are now just evolutionary relics that should be harmlessly removed whenever they get in the way. (Progressives also view voters the same way.)
This case is the front line in the inevitable collision of two gigantic issues, parents’ rights and sexual freedom. Some of the most hotly-debated issues are being fought on this battleground, such as kids’ access to highly sexualized materials at school. The pro-sexual freedom activists are simply not satisfied with gay marriage, a confusing array of customized pronouns, freedom to live openly as unattractive transvestites, and the right to “identify” their special unique-butterfly sexualities in a farrago of mind-numbing categories as numberless as the stars in the heavens.
And they want our kids to live that way, too. That’s the issue the Fifth Circuit held off ruling on, this time, and that’s the issue that the Daily Beast was trying to terrify its readers about. This is why the conservative counter-revolution is so necessary and important.
Hopefully, the Texas father’s lawyers are drafting the new lawsuit as you read this.
🔥 National Review ran a story yesterday headlined, “‘Eight Million Reasons’: Jim Jordan Accuses Biden of Retaining Classified Info to Secure Lucrative Book Deal.”
Yesterday, in a contentious hearing featuring democrats and republicans playing clips of each other’s presidential candidates making verbal gaffes, Congress questioned Special Counsel Ben Hur. Hur is the DOJ lawyer who investigated Biden’s classified documents problem and decided not to prosecute Biden, since to a jury it would look like he was beating up a deranged old man who doesn’t even know where he is half the time.
Both Democrats and Republicans seemed annoyed with Hur. Democrats were annoyed because Hur’s report describes Biden as a drooling moron. Republicans were upset that Hur declined to recommend prosecution, just like what happened with Hilary.
But among the more intense moments at the hearing, there was one electrifying series of questions where Congressman Jim Jordan prodded Hur into admitting that not only did Biden take classified documents — when he was just the vice president, with no presidential declassification powers — but Biden also disclosed official secrets to the guy who was ghostwriting Joe’s autobiography, a guy with no security clearance.
Joe then made $8 million bucks on the book deal.
Useless Special Counsel Robert Hur, under fire
In other words, by the undisputed facts, Biden illegally disclosed classified U.S. intelligence to enrich himself. Biden sold secrets. Trump has never been credibly accused of improperly disclosing classified information. So Biden’s situation is, as democrats are constantly bleating, totally different from Trump’s.
The truth is Biden’s classified documents problems are much, much worse than Trump’s.
Even worse, after Hur began investigating Biden’s misuse and illegal retention of the classified documents, Biden’s panicked ghostwriter desperately and unsuccessfully tried to delete the recordings of Biden reading from classified files. If the ghostwriter had been a Republican, he’d be locked up right now. He would have been promptly prosecuted and convicted of obstruction of justice and intentional destruction of evidence. He’d have earned a long stint in federal prison.
But no charges were filed against Biden’s ghostwriter, even though Hur’s report clearly described the facts. Biden’s ghostwriter clearly rides in the Justice System’s first class section.
Unsurprisingly, liberal media ignored these issues and claimed victory from Hur’s testimony. The Washington Post ran a story focusing only on areas where Hur disagreed with Republicans’ questions, headlined, “Hur’s testimony undermines some key GOP claims on Biden.”
“Some” key GOP claims. Some.
But thanks to platforms like X, the information is leaking out. We are getting there, drip by drip by drip.
Speaking of dripping, it’s time for a quick refill and then the family is heading out, for a day of rappelling into some kind of slot canyon. It may be a slot, but hopefully the canyon is scorpion-free.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Thanks for putting up with vacation-style roundup posts; we are almost done. Just a few more days and we’ll be back to normal. Come back tomorrow for another dose of vacation roundup to help get you through the day, kind of like a blogging nicotine patch. See you then.
We can’t do it without you. Consider joining with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠
Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com
© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
