JENNA ELLIS (HOST): I think that we are going to look back on this period in American history and historians are going to look back and say, how on Earth was anyone trying to promulgate this type of disaster and this type of child abuse when the United States has always, for example, been against FGM, or female genital mutilation, in other third world countries? And yet that's a totally contradictory policy now that we are supposed to just completely ignore under the auspices of manipulating these definitions.
But from a 30,000-foot perspective here, it is so maddening to me as someone who loves the Constitution, who has studied this not only from a legal perspective, but just from a philosophical perspective as a Christian — and I know you're a Christian as well — and how the left continually manipulates and perverts the language of the Constitution to somehow suggest that there is a right that's protected by the Constitution, that parents can go and give their children puberty blockers and cut off their genitalia.
I mean, the founders would have thought this was just completely beyond the pale, would have never stood for it. And it frustrates me, and I think it would for you as well, to see how often these lawyers create these arguments that are intentionally manipulating what the plain text says. And they can't possibly make these arguments coherently, but yet they try.
ANDREW BAILEY (MISSOURI ATTORNEY GENERAL): Yeah. You're right. I mean, it's sophistry — the nadir of sophistry. And I would point out that the words in the Constitution matter. The Constitution exists to protect us from government. The rights found in the Bill of Rights come from God, not man. And the government exists to protect our rights, not infringe upon them.
And at the end of the day, the words have to have the understanding they had at the time they were written down. So it's the text and the original understanding and the tradition and history of the document that matter so much to me and that, you know, we have to fight to protect.
And you're right — it's absolutely perverted when you try to plumb the depths of the plain language, the equal protection clause, the original history and understanding thereof, to find that there's some kind of right to sterilize children.
But two other points I want to make.
Number one, history — to your point — history's not going to look kindly on this point in time. I mean, I think back to the 1940s and 50s when quote-unquote “leading scientific experts" at the time thought that lobotomies were a good idea, that when people came in with mental health conditions, cutting out a portion of their brain was somehow, you know, good medicine. And we look back now in horror at that practice as morally abhorrent and not based on any objective reality. And certainly I think this will be looked on the same way.
The other point I wanted to make is the expert that we called on our side in the course of the hearing and the motion for preliminary injunction that ultimately was, I think, a credible witnesses — a credible witness — opined two points there. Number one, that children who receive puberty blockers and hormone therapy, who are suffering from gender dysphoria are actually more likely to commit suicide. So this lie that the left is selling, that somehow there's going to be more teen suicides because we were protecting children is absolutely false based on the actual data that we have available to us. But also, I would point out that our expert testified that this is the only mental health condition in which we treat with hormones instead of traditional psychotherapy, psychology, psychiatry. Why are we doing this one any differently, especially when there's no medicine or science to back it up?
ELLIS: Right. And can you — could you have ever imagined going through law school that this would be what you are facing and what you're fighting for? I mean, it — to me, it's just totally bizarre and remarkable that we've gotten to the point that we don't even as a society agree on certain fundamentals.
I mean, when our founders shaped this country, they debated ardently what a more perfect union would be. And we've had significant, genuine progress in our country. We now don't have slavery. I have the right to vote as a woman. I mean, some of these things that we have progressed toward. But at the same time, our founders started with this unanimous declaration. They had uniformity and unanimity that our rights come from God, our creator, that there was such a thing as natural law, there were limitations and limiting principles to not only government, but also what was permissible in a moral and upright society.
And where we are at today, I look at some of the conversations, not only on legacy media, but social media as well, where people don't even share the same fundamental basis that men are men and women are women. And for the people that just deny reality, we can't even begin to argue with them. And it's concerning as well that this isn't just something in the public forum that people are arguing about. Now this is actually in a court of law, and you have these judges where some of them have a more cultural Marxist perspective, if they are crazy leftists that are appointed. And this is genuinely concerning that we might have judicial precedent that is fundamentally unmoored from reality.
BAILEY: Yeah. I mean, welcome to the godless reformation, where you can be burned at the stake for trying to protect children from sterilization. And the hate machine of the left is in full tilt against this because they know that the mood is shifting on this issue.
And yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. It starts with objective reality. It is unhealthy for me to deny objective reality in the same way that it's unhealthy for me to deny the law of gravity. I may think it doesn't exist, but if I jumped into the Grand Canyon, something bad is going to happen. It is unhealthy to deny the objective reality that gender is an immutable characteristic and that there's man and woman. And like you said, that's defined by biology.
And so, yeah. I mean, I would say that the depravity of the left so outpaces the rational lawmaking that we struggle for our statutes and our courts to keep up with the depravity of the left. We can't war game against an enemy that it goes so far to the extreme that it's destructive to their own position, it's destructive to themselves, it's hypocritical. You know, it just, it's so far out there that we struggle to keep pace with it.
ELLIS: And you're doing a great job trying to keep pace with it there in Missouri. And I hope that every other attorney general that is grounded in reality and understands that there is natural law, there is moral truth that is objective, will follow suit.
