The U.S. Supreme Court began its Fall 2024 term on Monday, which means the slate of cases they have agreed to hear is now final. Among the most important cases the court will consider are top cultural controversies. Significantly, other cultural controversies are not on the docket.

Gender Transition Procedures for Minors

“The single biggest case of this term” is U.S. vs. Skrmetti, which concerns the Biden-Harris administration’s challenge to a Tennessee law protecting minors from gender transition procedures, explained Josh Hammer, senior counsel for the Article III Project. “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled the correct way in ultimately upholding Tennessee’s ability to regulate, if not outright ban, if they want, genital mutilation for children.”

The U.S. Department of Justice “is making a 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause argument there, essentially arguing that transgender status [and] gender identity is a constitutionally protected suspect class under the 14th Amendment,” he said.

“You really don’t have to be a lawyer to know that this is total bumpkin,” he hammered home. For “thousands and thousands of thousands of years, we have always known that there are two sexes in humanity. There is male, and there is female. We know that from natural observation. We know that from just empirically observing the way the world works. We know from Genesis 1:27 as well. We know that every which way we can know it.”

As a result, “Tennessee is well within its rights to regulate — and, if it wants to, outright ban — genital mutilation and chemical castration for minors,” Hammer declared. “I’m actually fairly confident that the Supreme Court is going to do the right thing here.”

Pro-transgender activists have challenged laws protecting minors from gender transition procedures in states across the country since the Arkansas legislature enacted the first law of this kind in 2021. So far, the Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuit Courts have weighed in to a greater or lesser extent, with varying results. This fraught legal issue, proliferating litigation, and a circuit court split virtually guaranteed that the question “was destined to go to the Supreme Court eventually,” noted Family Research Council Action President Jody Hice. Thus, the Supreme Court’s timely decision to hear oral arguments will make it a major focus of the term.

Age Verification for Sexually Explicit Sites

The Supreme Court is also slated to review a Texas law requiring age verification for websites with sexually explicit content, a policy that a third of states have either adopted or are in the process of adopting. Hice observed that this debate lies right next to the controversy over “pornographic books in libraries and schools that are being used for children,” meaning that this question “has to enter into the long-term debate.”

“Historically speaking, this is kind of Federalism [or] Constitutional Law 101,” Hammer responded. While “Congress has specifically enumerated powers under Article I, Section Eight of the Constitution … the traditional view is that the police powers reside in the 50 states. And the traditional way that the police powers were viewed was to regulate the health, morals, and safety of their respective populations.”

“I cannot think of something that more quintessentially fits the state police power,” Hammer added. “If we even still believe in something like a state police power in the 21st century … surely it’s going to apply to the ability of Texas to implement an age verification for pornographic websites.”

Hammer was less confident that the Supreme Court would handle this issue properly, given its “hit or miss” track record on restraining pornography, such as its libertine verdict in a late 1990s case ACLU v. Reno. However, he did acknowledge that “this current court stands in … as good a position as any to start to slightly pare back the ACLU v. Reno ruling.”

Personhood of the Unborn

One significant case the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider this term is a ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court that unborn babies are human beings. Abortion activists launched a furious assault on the ruling, first claiming that it threatened the viability of in vitro fertilization (IVF), and then leaping a logical chasm to claim without a shred of evidence that those malicious right-wingers were plotting to ban IVF across the country.

“What was lost in the weeds was that, while this is obviously a politically — and in some ways morally — fraught issue, IVF, that particular case was actually a very straightforward case of statutory interpretation,” Hammer explained. “The Alabama Supreme Court and the Alabama state judiciary had … interpreted its wrongful death of a minor statute, for a very long time, to hold that, when the statute talks about a child and children, then an unborn child and unborn children are included there.” In other words, “all the court had to do” to reach its conclusion “was to not legislate from the bench and to read in an extra utero exception,” he added.

“It’s not surprising that the Supreme Court did not step in there, given the fact that, legally speaking, [this] was actually a fairly straightforward case,” Hammer reasoned. “The court doesn’t necessarily step in every time there is a politically or morally charged issue. Rather, they only do so when there are very clear conflicts of interpretation” or when “there is a legally interesting case.”

Thus, while gender transition procedures for minors and age verification laws will be on the docket this fall, Alabama’s law recognizing the personhood of the unborn will not be.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on cases both in the fall and the spring, then issue its decisions into the summer. The court usually holds its most controversial rulings until the very end of its term, which will conclude at the end of June 2025.