What is a Woman in the Social Imagination...

The following is an excerpt from https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/im-not-a-biologist/ with a commentary inserted by this blogger.

Marsha Blackburn, the senior United States senator from Tennessee, asked Judge Jackson a simple question: “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” Jackson, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and sometime supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review answered: “Can I provide a definition? No. I can’t. Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.” The judge, brow furrowed, seemed equal parts annoyed and genuinely confused.

Webster’s: “An adult female person; a grown-up female person, as distinguished from a man or a child; sometimes, any female person.”)

How does a court or a country function if its jurists feel they should defer to experts in life science for the definitions of basic English words? Law cannot be interpreted in a vacuum. One of the most basic inputs for sound jurisprudence is a working knowledge of what words mean. If a nominee to the high court really does not know what a woman is, we’re in trouble.

Yet the word is admittedly more fraught than most. If Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t know the answer to Senator Blackburn’s question, then neither do half the people in this country. The strategy of the left on every social issue has been to invent, and then expand, a moral gray area so that even (or especially) those with advanced degrees from elite universities find themselves unable to distinguish a woman from a child or a man. When you entertain the “I’m not a biologist” copout, you don’t just feed into the scientism and expertocracy of the ruling class; you cede the mapping of reality to people who have no interest in the territory.

Scientists, gender law scholars and philosophers of biology said Jackson’s response was commendable, though perhaps misleading. It’s useful, they say, that Jackson suggested science could help answer Blackburn’s question, but they note that a competent biologist would not be able to offer a definitive answer either. Scientists agree there is no sufficient way to clearly define what makes someone a woman, and with billions of women on the planet, there is much variation.

    But if that is true, then why have any study called biology? How could one even become a biologist if one starts from the position that one cannot know the basic differences between a man 'male' and a woman 'female'. What would then be a means to start the study of biology, right? In fact, when a baby is born, how could anyone determine the sex of the baby... well, if they are not a biologist they could not make such a determination even though every baby comes with biological determining facts ~ The Social Imagination

“What is a woman?” A judge who can’t provide an answer that question—or who thinks the matter of who is a human person and who is not as a “private” matter—has no place in the government of a just society.

Either Judge Jackson genuinely does not interpret the law in light of any moral framework—in which case she would be no better than the braindead legal nihilists whose reign has delivered every judicial abomination from Griswold to Bostock and beyond in each direction (this is the “stupid” option)—or the substantive vision that informs her jurisprudence would be so objectionable to the half of Americans who do know what a woman is and do not want babies murdered that she thought better of speaking it aloud before the Senate (this is the “lying” option).

 

~  A wife of noble character is her husband’s crown, but she who causes shame is like decay in his bones. The plans of the righteous are just, but the counsel of the wicked leads to deceit.…Proverbs 12: 4-5. Sure you can make the liberal (LGBT) argument that those are just pronouns and a wife is a social concept which either a male or female could role play. But, make no mistake, only a woman 'female' can give birth and that is based on the science of biology. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world... John 16:21.