The Godmother and the Offer We Can’t Refuse

“I Don’t Know What a Woman Is, but the 1st Amendment Can’t Hamstring the Government”

AI image prompted by the author.

When I was a little boy, my mother would regularly ask and answer this rhetorical question: “If all your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you jump, too? No, son, you would not.” She stopped when she figured I was old enough to understand. Partly because my parents never divorced, I am still alive to remember that my father’s contribution added a bit of rational fear to the lesson.

I’m told that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson grew up in a two-parent household, so I presume her recent novel theory about the First Amendment did not originate with her parents. She’s also only nine years younger than me, so I’d bet her parents gave her the same advice about friends and cliffs.

Nevertheless, on  March 18, 2024, Justice Jackson asked and answered a similar rhetorical question for the entire nation: If all your child’s friends were jumping off tall buildings, would your child jump, too? Yes, they might, which is why the government must declare a public emergency and ban anyone from using the phrase “jump off tall buildings.”

Her “biggest” stated concern was that government has “a duty to take steps to protect the citizens,” and that a commonsense view of First Amendment speech protections might be “hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.”

That surprising revelation came during oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri (previously Missouri v. Biden), a case which will decide if the federal government can legally violate the First Amendment by “encouraging or pressuring” private corporations to censor legal speech.

Her revelation appeared even as people are still recovering from the worldwide whiplash of so-called “democratic” governments violating their own so-called “protections” of free speech. But what surprised me most was her analogy.

Jackson famously said in her 2022 Senate confirmation hearing that she could not define the word “woman” because she’s “not a biologist.” Yesterday she said she is “really worried” about “the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government’s perspective,” and the government might not be able to stop a hypothetical “epidemic” of children killing themselves by jumping off tall buildings.

As Jackson uttered those words, some American state governments make it illegal for doctors to “encourage or pressure” children not to “jump off the tall building” of transgender medical procedures — even if those kids might change their minds about their identity in a few short years.

At the same time, parents are told by government officials, doctors, teachers, and CEOs — an entire society, in fact — that failing to accept their child’s gender identity could very well cause their child to kill themselves, perhaps by jumping off a tall building.

Freedom, they say, can only be achieved by accepting the government’s power over the relationship between parents and children. If you refuse their generous offer, your children can be taken away. So be free! Accept the offer that can’t be refused!

Scene from The Godfather.

Even if these ideas about government, freedom, parents and children were brand new, no one in their right mind would excuse Justice Jackson’s flagrant undemocratic authoritarianism.

But they are not new. In fact, they are old and French, having come from the mind of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the year 1762.

Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract that a just government must compel its people to be free from the oppression of their fellow citizens: “anyone who refuses obedience to the general will is forced to it by the whole body,” he wrote. “This merely means that he is being compelled to be free.”

Creating a whole society of these “free” citizens would be difficult, of course, and so the task cannot be left to independent families. No, courageous government officials “must be ready to change human nature, to transform every individual” into a person who conceives of “individuality only in its connection with the body of the state, and to be aware of their own existence merely as parts of the state.”

AI images prompted by the author.

Obviously, this fundamental transformation must take place during childhood, so the government must assume the place of the parents. And no parents could possibly protest, Rousseau wrote, since they would only be accepting a different title. They would be known as “citizens,” and their courageous local government officials would exercise the authority of parents.

The resulting relationship between you and your kids would be exactly the same, so who could object? The officials would be obeyed in the name of the law just as you were obeyed in the name of nature. See? It’s exactly the same, only better! Just ask your doctor!

Once upon a time, these ideas were deemed incredible — as in outrageously stupid and totalitarian — by every American. But yesterday, March 18, 2024, they were given a full-throated endorsement by a sitting Supreme Court Justice in a public courtroom.

Mark your calendars, mothers of America, because the country has reached a tipping point. If you decide that “doing nothing” is the correct response to total government control over your speech, your kids, and their healthcare, then one day you will wake up to a totalitarian state — where family relationships have been transformed into political relationships and your kids call you Citizen Birthing Person.

Scene from The Godfather. Not shown is the severed horse’s head.