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All columns after October 19, 2022 can be found on Substack.

Wyoming should support Senator Scott’s bill to protect children.

Photo credit: Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash.com

Senator Charlie Scott (R-Casper), longtime chairman of the Senate Labor and Health Committee, is drafting a bill that would add a section to Wyoming’s child abuse statutes, criminalizing so-called “sex-change treatments for children.” This is a commonsense initiative that everyone should support. 

The tragedy of misguided medical treatments and the disabled people they leave in their wake is staggering. Large-scale sex change treatments for children began a little more than a decade ago, and those children are only now realizing what was done to them. Unethical psychologists, surgeons, and hospitals promise children the moon in order to sell pricy pharmaceuticals and six-figure surgeries. They get rich while children are irreversibly damaged and left to live with the life-long consequences.

Both the psychological and physiological facts of gender transition treatments are documented in scholarly books on the subject. “When Harry Became Sally,” by Ryan T. Anderson focuses on biology, while “Irreversible Damage,” by Abigail Shrier examines psychology. But Anderson’s book is banned from Amazon and Shrier’s search results are suppressed.

Scott’s legislation shouldn’t be necessary. Wyoming has always protected children from sexual abuse. Statutory rape laws (A.K.A. sexual abuse of a minor) are designed to protect the victim who “consented” to the act. Centuries of common law jurisprudence have determined that “consent” is not legally possible for minor children for at least three reasons.

First, human beings take many years to develop fully in mind and body. Nobody expects a toddler to be mature enough to consent to run in the street, nor a teenager to self-regulate alcohol. While their children mature, caring parents will override the child’s choices. They do not do so not to withhold affirmation, but to prevent harm to developing minds and bodies.

Second, the development of human sexuality is not a gradual sliding scale. Rather, it takes a quantum leap at puberty. Before that quantum leap takes place, young people cannot fathom the powerful emotional, physical, and spiritual realities that come with being mature men or women. They lack the information to give informed consent about sex. Even during the Dark Ages, minors could not legally take lifelong vows of celibacy. But minors today who swear that they want a change in sex, have no recourse when they grow up.

The third reason for statutory rape laws stems from the axiom: “the most important sex organ is between the ears.” A human’s prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until the age of 25. Thus, long after the body is grown, true informed consent is elusive. Some laws give full agency to 18-year-olds while alcohol, tobacco, and firearms are withheld until 21. The addictive hormones and elective surgeries of sex change are more like the latter than the former.

Britain’s National Health Services already went down this foolish path and is now reversing course. In 2011, its Tavistock gender-identity clinic, in London, began to give pre-pubescent minors cancer drugs that interfere with the progression of puberty. These are followed, after puberty, by artificial hormones that mimic hormones of the opposite sex. In ten years, referrals to the clinic had multiplied by 36 times, and 98.5 percent of these referrals were minors.

Kiera Bell

Then their patients started coming of age. A former patient,  Kiera Bell, sued and won. She had been prescribed the drug protocol as a minor and a double mastectomy at 20. In 2020 the High Court ruled that the clinic was wrong to give permanently body-altering treatments to minors unable to comprehend what they are agreeing to. While that court battle rages on, the Tavistock clinic now faces one of the largest “medical negligence cases of all time,” and is shuttering next year. 

Opponents of Senator Scott’s bill claim that these permanent and elective pharmaceuticals and surgical procedures are legitimate health care and should be left to the medical and psychological “experts.” But the experts do not agree. After Tavistock started doing these things to minors, numerous psychologists resigned in protest. During one three-year span alone (2016-18), 35 resigned from the clinic. 

Meanwhile, more than 50 years after sex-change operations began, and more than a decade after minors began to receive them, the current AMA “standard of care” still has nothing to do with longitudinal research and positive outcomes, and everything to do with the wishes of the patient. Thus, as children come of age and realize that they have been permanently sterilized and/or will be unable to breastfeed their own children, they are denied even the recourse of a medical malpractice suit. 

Wyoming has always protected minors from adults who would convince them to engage in harmful behavior. It shouldn’t matter whether those adults are drug pushers, human traffickers, doctors, or surgeons. Harm is harm. We should all stand up and say, “not in our state.”

Political parties and the power of friendship

Photo credit: Hannah Busing, on Unplash

Today’s partisan rancor—both between parties and within parties—tempts many into fevered dreams of a utopian, party-less world. But more sober thinking realizes that even if all party lines were erased, it could not be a party-less system, but only a single-party system. That’s no dream. It’s a nightmare.

The right to form political parties is written into the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law respecting …the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” These words are not merely about picket lines. Taken together, they recognize the right of individuals to amplify their voices by unifying their concerns into a single petition or a single candidate. That’s what political parties do.

To accomplish this, political parties have the right to determine who may join their assembly, and who may not. And governments may not intimidate individuals from joining. Nor may they mandate the inclusion of members that oppose a party’s “beliefs and ideas.” In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Alabama could not even require the NAACP to reveal its membership list without violating the First Amendment.

Nevertheless, Wyoming’s state legislature has both taken over the membership lists of our political parties and used its power to influence their internal decisions. These deep encroachments on First Amendment rights were, no doubt, made with good intentions. 

Since the county clerks already had the equipment, the voter registry, and the expertise to run elections, why not piggyback party primaries onto municipal and county elections? This arrangement made sense until government officials began to exert state control over party primaries. 

Governments have the authority to register voters. But they have no inherent right to track party affiliation. It is only by the leave of political parties that the state can do so. Nevertheless, this summer, the Secretary of State usurped control of the party registration lists and directed county clerks to withhold information from elected party officers.

As the Joint Corporations committee discusses LSO-190 Voter registry list at Friday’s meeting, it would do well to keep NAACP v. Alabama in mind. That landmark case requires states to keep their noses out of party membership lists, not to withhold party membership information from the parties themselves.

But it gets worse. In 2021 the Wyoming Republican Party central committee overwhelmingly voted to conduct its primary elections by way of run-off instead of plurality voting. A vote at the statewide convention ought to have been enough to effect this change. Instead, the GOP had to take it to the state legislature, where current House leadership would not even let it be considered. 

2020 Wyoming GOP Convention, Gillette

Now, the Joint Corporations committee has asked for bill draft, LSO-0192 Election revisions, to introduce ranked-choice voting. Runoff elections make certain that a clear majority of the party supports the party’s candidate. This bill strips political parties of their right even to have a party candidate.

The entire point of forming political parties was to use the power of free assembly to petition the government for a single candidate of the party’s choosing to be listed on the November ballot. Ranked-choice voting hijacks this process and bypasses the political parties altogether. It is such a total takeover of party primaries that citizens are stripped of any power to organize in the fielding of candidates.  

Elected legislators—whether Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or Constitutional—who don’t want runoff elections can petition their own party convention for the type of election that suits them. But never should they use state power to override the will of parties. Any reduction of the power of individuals to organize is a power grab by the state.

This is a First-Amendment issue, but it rests on something even deeper. The very reason that the United States Constitution recognizes the right of free assembly and petition is because it recognizes the more fundamental power of friendship. Mobs have awesome power. But friends acting in agreement can even turn aside an angry mob.

The mob has power because it is large, and it is loud. Friends have power because they care about each other and are willing to defer to one another for a greater cause. We should not confuse these powers. 

Both cooperate to get things done. But mobs can be manipulated by heartless crowd psychology, while friends who defer willingly are more stable and less easily manipulated. Mobs use the vote to dominate the loser, while friends use the vote to find the candidate or idea that they want to put forward. It is the willingness to defer—and not the power of the vote—that gives the party power. 

That’s why good legislation will always prefer to give power to parties rather than to mobs.

Get ready for fireworks at next Friday’s Corporations committee meeting

Joint Corporations Committee, 2021 (Photo credit: Nick Reynolds)

Next Friday’s meeting of the Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions committee in Cheyenne is slated to take up a number of controversial bill drafts relating to Wyoming elections. Log on at 8:30am and break out the popcorn.

The day starts tamely enough with a continued discussion LSO-132 Political Expenditures. It proposes a federal constitutional amendment to restrict the flow of dark money in political campaigns. 

The remainder of the morning is devoted to the Secretary of State’s office presenting an “election fraud investigation” of the Coal Country Conservatives (CCC). This PAC, with a budget of $1,800, registered with the FEC. But the Campbell county clerk wanted them investigated for not also registering with the SOS office. Wyoming Statute is explicit that “federal political action committees shall not be required to file [with the SOS if] the committee is required to comply with federal election law reporting requirements” (Wyo. Stat. 22-25-106(g)).

The CCC PAC’s $1,800 is dwarfed by the Western Conservatives PAC’s $355,133 spent to unseat conservatives. It seems small potatoes, and a strange use of two-and-a-half hours of the committee’s time. On the upside, it is heartening to know that some people can allege “election fraud” without being labeled as “election deniers.” 

After the lunch break, the bill draft, LSO-191 Municipal nonpartisan ranked-choice elections, will be discussed. This proposes to bring Utah’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) to Wyoming. Cities can deny any political party the right to run municipal officers of their own choosing. Rather, RCV imposes a uni-party scheme that transfers the votes of the loser to a second-choice candidate and counts the ballots again.

LSO-192 Election revisions, will be the next bill draft considered. It would prohibit political parties from fielding a candidate of their own choosing for statewide or federal office. Instead, RCV would be used to select four candidates—regardless of party—for listing on the November ballot. RCV is currently bluing states like California, Delaware, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Alaska.

Both RCV bills neuter political parties. Such a deliberate kneecapping of party relevance begs the question of why we have them in the first place. We will discuss this in a future column.

Next up is LSO-190 Voter registry list. It would stipulate that, when asked, county clerks must provide voter registry lists with voter I.D. numbers and absentee ballot data. This is a good thing.

The bill was necessitated by a unilateral change in policy on the part of the SOS office. Prior to 2022, candidates and interested citizens routinely requested and received this information. But this summer the SOS office, without legislative approval, instructed county clerks not to release that information any longer.

LSO-196 Vacancies in elected office is designed to strip political parties of their statutory rights in filling vacancies to elected office. Currently, when a Republican or Democrat resigns from office, the state central committee of that party must give the governor three nominees from which he chooses a replacement. This bill would end that long-standing law. 

LSO-189 Election equipment-federal certification tethers Wyoming election laws to the changing recommendations of the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSGs) that are farmed out to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC). Thus, Wyoming’s elected and accountable state officials will no longer be answerable to voters for their own competence and judgment. Instead, they will blindly impose whatever new edicts these anonymous and opaque federal bureaucracies might decree in the future.

LSO-271 Specified election records not subject to disclosure would alter state statutes to prevent Wyoming citizens from examining cast ballots, cast ballot images, and cast vote records. In response to dozens of public records requests from citizens, county clerks all over Wyoming have claimed that the constitution prohibits release of these records. The committee obviously thinks this claim is dubious. But rather than instruct the clerks to follow the law, it drafted a bill to put these election records out of reach. So much for transparency. 

For its final act, the committee will take up LSO-186 Wyoming elections commission. This drastically alters Wyoming’s long-standing law by stripping the Secretary of State of his election oversight duties. It is hard to read this bill as anything other than a slap in the face of every primary voter who went to the polls to vote for election reform. 

Rarely do committee meetings promise to be as electric and noteworthy as this one. If you are interested in any of these topics, make your way to the Capitol Extension (W006) next Friday (October 14, 2022). If you cannot be there in person, register beforehand to testify via Zoom. I am sure that the Corporations Committee would love to hear from you.