Judge Shopping, Oppositional Extremism and the Antithesis Phase of Dialectical Progress in the Civil Rights Movement

Looked at superficially, as many do in the Age of Trump when politics is carried out in fewer than 140 characters, one could imagine that the LGBTQ community has recently suffered onerous setbacks in court.

Beginning with the Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College decision out of the 7th Circuit a month ago, where a three judge panel affirmed the lower court decision that employment discrimination against lesbians was not protected by Title VII, and continuing on through August with a federal district court ruling against a trans woman represented by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in Michigan, a preliminary injunction against the Department of Education's guidance on trans Title IX rights in schools, and the most recent attempt to carve out a Hobby Lobby religious exemption to permit anti-trans discrimination in health care, the news has all been bad. Bad if you just read the headlines, and skip the decisions themselves and the back stories. Or, unfortunately, if you read some of the analysis in leading cultural magazines such as The Atlantic.

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