In a matter of a week, the much-vaunted “conservative” Supreme Court sided with two lower court decisions in separate cases to force the state of Idaho to offer a castration “operation” to a male inmate who thinks he’s a female and to release 837 criminals in Ohio. Meanwhile, the court refuse to intervene on behalf of our inalienable rights being trampled every day by state governments. If this is what a conservative Supreme Court is all about, I’d hate to see what a liberal court looks like.

It’s truly hard to conjure up a more extreme ruling from a court than one suggesting that it’s cruel and unusual punishment NOT to offer a castration to a male inmate in prison requesting one. Yet that is exactly what the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals did when three judges issued an order in August requiring Idaho’s Department of Corrections to fund “gender confirmation surgery” for Adree Edmo.

Unfortunately, none of us are shocked by the depravity from the Ninth Circuit any more. What is shocking, however, is the fact that the Supreme Court refused to stay the ruling last Thursday. One would have expected the high court that is supposedly conservative to easily overturn this decision at the first opportunity. In Estelle v. Gamble (1976), the Supreme Court already set the standard of an Eighth Amendment violation for denying medical care to prisoners as “only medical care so unconscionable as to fall below society’s minimum standards of decency.” Moreover, a First Circuit ruling in 2014 and a Fifth Circuit ruling in March 2019 stated the exact opposite of the Ninth Circuit.

Yet on May 21, the Supreme Court denied the motion from Idaho to stay the Ninth Circuit’s order. According to the court’s order, only Justices Thomas and Alito would have granted the application for stay from the state. How the other three GOP appointees, especially Roberts and Kavanaugh who seem to worship precedent, could allow a ruling like this to stand is stupefying.

This is the second time in recent months that the “conservative” Supreme Court has denied a stay to Idaho in the face of an unprecedented Ninth Circuit ruling creating radical phantom rights centered on twisting the Eighth Amendment. In September, the high court denied a stay of a Ninth Circuit ruling creating an Eighth Amendment right to camp out on Boise’s city streets. The city issued a public health and safety ordinance to clear out these encampments, but the Ninth Circuit ruled that it would be tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment to do so – just like denying the “right” to a castration procedure.

Now let’s move on to the Ohio prison case, because it appears that criminals are the only ones with rights these days. On April 22, a federal judge in Ohio ordered the Bureau of Prisons to release 837 federal inmates in one Ohio facility into home confinement for fear of the coronavirus. Courts all over the country have already mandated the release of state prisoners. In total, 67,000 have been released from state prisons and jails at a very painful cost to public safety. This is the first fight over the federal prison system. Yesterday, the court voted 6-3 to deny a request for a stay, at least for now. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch would have granted the stay.

It’s truly shocking to watch how the virus can be used as a pretext to eliminate the entire Bill of Rights for peaceful Americans without due process. However, these same courts have no problem using the virus to override the very generous due process that resulted in incarceration of dangerous criminals. The Ohio judge said that anyone deemed at risk from the virus must be released, regardless of his threat level or how much time he has served.

As I’ve observed before, the virus has already spread far and wide in prisons, and there is no point in mass releases now. The death rate in prisons is remarkably low, most cases are asymptomatic, and there is therefore no reason why prisoners should have a greater right to avoid the virus than the general population. In fact, by releasing these criminals, not only would the federal government endanger public safety, but it would be releasing younger people into the general population, where they would be more likely to spread the virus. The BOP has already taken more precautions to quarantine in the facilities than the prisoners would abide by were they released.

Isn’t it interesting how some of these same allegedly conservative justices refuse to side with individual rights when it comes to states shutting down businesses, infringing upon individual movements, and mandatory mask requirements, yet they suddenly discover individual liberty for criminals, including the “right” to a taxpayer-funded castration, the right to criminal release, and the right to homeless encampments on city streets?

Hey, phony conservative justices: If you are so into transmogrifying the Cruel and Unusual Punishment clause of the Bill of Rights – even against public safety goals of a state – shouldn’t that apply to the lockdowns and unprecedented assaults against our rights? Or is the Bill of Rights only for criminals?

If the “my body, my choice” mantra applies to murdering the unborn and requesting us to pay for castration, then it should apply to our own bodily integrity not to wear masks and not to be spied on by the corona fascists.

Missed in the headlines from yesterday’s Senate hearing is the implication from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s assertion that it may not be safe to reopen schools even in the fall. What that means is that any existence of a virus, even when is causes fewer death in kids than the flu, is now a pretext for closing schools and destroying a generation of education, children’s mental health, and parents’ ability to work and provide. This is unacceptable, and it’s time for Trump to #FireFauci.

Shutting down the schools was a colossal mistake. Kids have next to zero risk from the virus, and study after study has shown that they have little or no transmissibility to adults (data from Iceland, UK, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, France, and Taiwan) The collateral damage of closing schools is enormous and outweighs any risk we take – and the risk during every flu season is already much higher. This is why even the worst lockdown countries – from Israel and Australia to Norway and France – are reopening schools. Our government, on the other hand, is not directed by science, so nearly every state has closed schools for the rest of the year. But summer camps and school in the fall will be on schedule, right? Especially with so few deaths occurring now outside of nursing homes, right?

Think again.

In a hearing full of Republicans who sounded like Democrats, Senator Rand Paul was the only one who stood up for the American people and noted the low fatality rate for most people and that there is no science behind closing schools. Bristled by Rand’s charge that Fauci is not “the end-all,” Fauci responded by saying, "We don't know everything about this virus and we really better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children.”

Then he pulled out his latest trick, the Kawasaki-like disease they are seeing in New York City among children. "For example, right now, children presenting with COVID-19 who actually have a very strange inflammatory syndrome very similar to Kawasaki syndrome," added Fauci as a rationale for continuing to close schools.

Kawasaki is something that causes over 5,000 hospitalizations in young children some years, and we never hear about it. Fauci and the purveyors of perpetual panic porn point to the fact that some of those kids in New York tested positive for COVID-19 to insinuate some sort of relationship. But the New York serology study showed that roughly one-quarter of all city residents have contracted COVID-19, so naturally any studied population for any medical analysis will contain people who test positive.

At the end of the hearing, Chairman Lamar Alexander asked Fauci to clarify whether he meant to say there should be no schooling until we have a vaccine. He replied that he was “absolutely not” saying we should wait for a vaccine but that it will depend on the testing capacity and the "dynamic of the outbreak in the region."

Earlier in the hearing, in response to a question from Alexander, Fauci also seemed skeptical about opening colleges in the fall.

So Fauci is now laying the groundwork for a lower threshold of risk to trigger mass school closures than the flu. Every year you can find numerous media articles about children dying of the flu. Just a few weeks before coronavirus was declared a pandemic, CNN was reporting on a record number of children dying from the flu. In early January, the network reported on an unprecedented harsh flu season causing the death of children in NYC. One New York doctor was quoted as saying these kids being seen in hospitals and on life support weren’t even immunocompromised.

In total, according to the CDC, 174 children died from the flu this winter. Nobody in the country even knew about it. Yet when it comes to the religion of coronavirus panic, which had fewer deaths even at its peak among children than the flu, let alone now, it is a pretext for closing schools unless we conduct endless testing and meet impossible benchmarks.

According to the CDC, “For children (0-17 years), COVID-19 hospitalization rates are much lower than influenza hospitalization rates during recent influenza seasons.” Consider that as of May 6, only 10 children 14 or younger had died from COVID-19, according to the CDC, as opposed to 174 from this flu season.

Just this week, JAMA pediatrics published the results of a major study of 46 COVID-19 pediatric patients from the U.S. and Canada treated in PICUs, 40 of whom had “significant preexisting comorbidities.” Among other things, they concluded that, “children are at far greater risk of critical illness from influenza than from COVID-19.”

One final concern from the hearing is that nobody pressed Fauci on why so many European countries are opening schools now and whether the CDC or NIH have data refuting the endless studies that show little or no transmission from children to adults. Either they have the data and don’t want to share it, or they are criminally negligent by not using their tens of billions in new funding to study this issue.

Finally, has Fauci ever thought about the consequences of taking the young and healthy and turning them into bubble babies for a year? What will this do to them when they eventually get exposed to all sorts of viruses and bacteria that typically did not harm them with a stronger immune system? What will happen to them next flu season? Is he now going to use next flu season as a pretext to close schools?

There’s a reason why “Bubble Boy” is a fictional movie and not a way of life.