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On January 13, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding West Virginia’s and Idaho’s laws protecting fairness in women’s sports. Alliance Defending Freedom has supported and continues to support both states in defense of those laws. But it’s important to recognize the full significance of this litigation.
The case concerns fairness in women’s sports. But it does not only concern women’s sports. While we need to remember the limits of the law, we should also recognize moments dense with legal, cultural, and philosophical significance. This is one of them.
Most immediately, this case concerns the ability of states to pass laws that ensure fairness in women’s sports. And that is important and worthy in and of itself.
Single-sex competition loses meaning if based upon personal identification and not physical reality. Human civilization has long sorted athletes into men’s and women’s teams. But it’s not because all those people happen to think the same way about themselves. Far from it. We might as well sort athletes according to their favorite color or flavor of ice cream at that point: those who like blue over here and those who like red over here. In fact, the variety of different potential self-identifications may span a rich and incalculable spectrum. And yet we all realize that sorting along those lines would render the distinction arbitrary. Instead, we sort athletes based on real physical distinctions that preserve the integrity of the competition: sex, age, and to a certain extent skill level. This advances the purpose of fairness and, in most contexts, safety. A competition that rejects this concept, in favor of internal or personal identification, voids a primary goal of single-sex competition.
But the legal significance extends beyond the preservation of logic in single-sex competitions. It involves the ability of states to pass laws based on that logic, which may also apply in other contexts.
The plaintiff argues that the United States Constitution’s equal protection clause, as well as Title IX, prevent states from limiting participation in women’s sports to women, excluding men who identify as women. But if true, what prevents a state from passing similar laws in other contexts? The Supreme Court already ruled on a related issue in another recent case, United States v. Skrmetti. It upheld a Tennessee law prohibiting certain surgeries on minors, which mutilate the body in an attempt at conformity to a perceived gender. But what about arenas of direct sex distinction? What if all state law efforts that require sex distinction violate the Constitution? What if states cannot develop laws that rely on objective, biological criteria to distinguish between men and women when regulating other spaces where those physical differences are, like in sports, the reason for separation?
The ability of states to legislate in this way will invariably impact culture more broadly.
Western thought has long pondered the relationship between law and culture. What shapes what? Different thinkers propose various paradigms for unpacking the relationship, but all must acknowledge that the two exist in a dialectical dance, often impacting one another over time. The law, on some level, always amounts to a social declaration of the appropriate rules to govern humanity’s shared existence. And so a law possesses inherent cultural meaning and value. Every law makes a reasoned argument about human life and how we ought to relate to each other.
The Supreme Court now considers the permissible limits of laws that concern natural, physical distinctions in the human body. If these state laws are struck down, it would undermine a state’s ability to make reasoned arguments and statements about the central distinction present in the human community since the dawn of time: male and female. And if the law cannot declare that men and women possess equality alongside inherent differences, and that respect for both equality and distinction produces better conditions for human flourishing, the same ethos will increasingly hold culture captive. Culture will gradually give way to a particular ideological framework that, by its own terms, rejects an anthropology grounded in natural law.
And of course this leads to, in some sense, the heart of the heart of the case. The human person is at stake. What is the human being? This question underlies all of history. It runs like a pulsating current beneath the vicissitudes of western civilization, and really all political communities. What are we? How ought we to live out our humanity? What is the good life? What is the common good we can all share as a community?
Every nation, every culture, responds to this question in some way. That is the essence of politics. As Father James Schall, a deceased theologian and political philosopher, has written, politics “presupposes our understanding of the internal order or disorder of human beings.” And of course Schall simply echoed millennia of political philosophy, from Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas. Every society engages in a dialogue around this question. So what proposals can be heard within our own legal and constitutional framework?
This is not about “legislating Christianity.” But, given the cultural impact already described, it does affect whether Christians have a full and fair voice in the dialogue of our times.
And Christianity has something powerful to say about the human person. The fall introduced disintegration into human existence. Life became divided – man from God, man from man, man from creation, and man from his own self. We all experience alienation from ourselves. In one way or another, we all experience a kind of homelessness within our own flesh. Where is healing? What mends the divide running through our inner being, which causes restlessness, shame, and anxiety, deepened by the sense that we are created for wholeness? Where are we complete? Where does our life obtain integrity and meaning?
Christianity rejects dualistic concepts of human life. We all experience conflict between our body and soul. For some, we reject the spiritual reality of human existence. For others, we reject physical realities. But both deceive us and lead us into restless wandering through waterless wastelands. Nothing there slakes the thirst of our inner being, crying out for wholeness. We must accept our bodies as a gift from a good God, who knit us, shaped us like a potter, in our mother’s womb, fashioning us with intentionality and love. We must reject the lies that wedge themselves into our lives and tear asunder relationships at every level of our being – including the lies we believe about our own bodies. This is true for all of us. And this is the way to wholeness proposed by Christianity.
The Supreme Court does not change this proclamation. But it does impact the contours of the conversation. It will impact the culture within which this philosophical discourse unfolds. And so it will impact the conditions into which the Gospel proclamation goes forth.
Court cases have limits. They do not dictate culture. They do not heal wounds. They do not determine philosophical truth. But they participate in the movements, health, and direction of society.
Will the court find a constitutional right to reject our own bodies, and demand that everyone else recognize our decision? Do laws that recognize distinctions written into the body, and make reasoned regulations accordingly, violate rights? Can the law make reasoned rules about human life, or must it submit to one particular ideological movement in our culture?
The Supreme Court will decide: can states require that single-sex competition track biological reality? Can the law acknowledge differences between the sexes in the arena of athletics without violating the Constitution?
And by implication, the Supreme Court impacts the legal and cultural conditions for an ongoing dialogue. The decision will impact our society writ large, and the circumstances into which the Gospel issues.
But there is always good news. His word, His voice, His healing, His salvation is greater than all circumstances, all conditions, all historical moments. And as faithful stewards of the Kingdom, we can confront this moment with prayer, with compassionate advocacy for the truth, with great love for our neighbor, great love for those who oppose the truth – and with great hope.
Please join us in continuing to pray for the Supreme Court as it considers these cases.
A reflection on the Supreme Court’s women’s sports cases and their significance for law, culture, and the human person.
