Josh Hammer, this morning on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, said the combined effect of Supreme Court rulings in U.S. v. Skrimetti, Mahmoud v. Taylor, and Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton represent a “tremendous parental rights revolution.” The court’s ruling in Skrimetti upheld Tennessee’s law banning “gender-affirming care” for minors, the ruling in Mahmoud allowed parents to opt their children out of gender-ideological lessons in public school, and Paxton upheld a Texas law requiring online pornography sites to verify their users are over 18.

JOSH HAMMER: The Trump v. CASA case, the media is calling it the so-called birthright citizenship case. They didn’t actually rule on birthright citizenship. We probably will get a ruling on that next term. But for now, this ruling, when it comes to the sweeping nature of so-called nationwide injunctions, is the firmest action the Roberts Court has taken to date in the 20-year history of the Roberts Court. This is the firmest action they’ve taken to try to finally, once and for all, put the lower court judicial insurrectionists in their place. Now, it’s not the final word on the topic. There is some lawyerly language in this majority opinion from Amy Coney Barrett that says something to the effect of, “Oh, you know, this is a remedy-at least unless and until it is truly absolutely necessary to achieve the desired effects.” I’m paraphrasing a little bit there, but there is some lawyerly language that will allow the ACLU, the open borders NGOs, and so forth to try to string this out a little further. But there’s also some very, very, very good language there. And I think that this is finally-finally, finally-at a bare minimum, going to lead the federal appellate courts, the courts of appeal, to try to slap down some of these rogue district court judges when they really step out of line. That is a tremendous victory. But that actually was not even the only major victory on Friday. Friday was one of the best days at the Supreme Court-probably in my entire adult lifetime. There were at least two other major victories as well. There was a case out of Montgomery County, Maryland-the Mahmoud v. Taylor case-involving the LGBT books, the transgender and homosexual books, in the public school, elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland. Very interesting case. You had a religiously pluralistic group of parents-Ukrainian Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim parents alike-suing on First Amendment free exercise grounds. Saying, Look, you guys are trying to indoctrinate our children into this sexual stuff that our faith says we cannot possibly tolerate. We need to be able to opt out our children-bare minimum here. Very strong ruling from Sam Alito’s 6–3 majority says that parents do indeed control the upbringing of their children. This is First Amendment free exercise right. Therefore, Montgomery County, at a bare minimum, has to allow the parents to opt out the children from this indoctrination. A similarly strong ruling out of a digital pornography case down in Texas-a case involving Ken Paxton, the great Attorney General there. Texas passed a statute called H.B. 1181, which would mandate that pornography websites in the Lone Star State have some sort of digital verification means to make sure that the people trying to access that pornography are at least 18 years old. Very commonsensical 6–3 ruling from Clarence Thomas says that, yes, of course, this is constitutional. Frankly, the most appalling part of that case to me, Steve, is that there are three justices who disagree with that. That there are three justices who apparently think that you have such an unambiguous, such an unfiltered First Amendment right to pornography-frankly, something that back in the time of the American founding, you would have been more likely to be tarred and feathered in the public square than to be able to assert a First Amendment right in court. Apparently, there are justices now who think you have such an unambiguous First Amendment right to that, that you can’t even limit it for minors. Really disgusting stuff, frankly. But anyway, a strong victory there. The combined effect-and I’ll stop after this-the combined effect of the Paxton case in Texas, the Mahmud case in Maryland, and then maybe the biggest culture war victory of the term, the United States v. Skrmetti case out of Tennessee-which was this additional 6–3 ruling where the court said that, yes, the state of Tennessee can severely limit or outright proscribe, ban, chemical castration, genital mutilation for John who thinks he is Jane, or Jane who thinks that she is John. That actually is constitutionally permissible. The combined effect of all this-Scrimetti, Mahmud, and Paxton-is a tremendous parental rights revolution. This is the greatest time to be a parent in America, maybe in American history-or at least since the earliest years of the republic-from a First Amendment perspective. And again, as a new parent myself-we had our baby daughter born in December-I’m very happy with that. That is for sure.

RealClearPolitics Videos