America chooses sanity and so does the Missouri Supreme Court (7-0!) | Opinion
A new Gallup poll released Wednesday found that “Americans are increasingly rejecting the two major political parties. Forty-five percent of Americans are independents, while just about a quarter of us are Democrats and roughly the same number are Republicans.”
If you don’t like what is going on Washington, D.C., Topeka and Jefferson City, you can take voters’ move to the center as a good sign. A friend of mine observed on Twitter that people are rejecting one party where you have to pretend Donald Trump won the 2020 election despite all the evidence and court decisions, and the other party where you have to pretend that men can get pregnant, despite, you know, reality.
In D.C., where I spent too much of my life, there are few people left who can say both that women get pregnant and that Joe Biden won in 2020. Yesterday, this was on full display when election-denying Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley questioned a reality-denying Democratic hearing witness about whether men can have babies.
Sen. Josh Hawley: “Can men get pregnant?”
Dr. Nisha Verma: “I’m not sure what the goal of the question is.”
Hawley: “The goal is to establish a biological reality. Can men get pregnant?”
Verma: “I take care of people with many identities.”
Hawley: “Can men get pregnant?”
Verma: “Again, as I’m saying …“
Hawley: “You said science and evidence should control. Can men get pregnant? You’re a doctor, I think.”
Verma: “Science and evidence should guide medicine.”
Hawley: “Do science and evidence tell us that men can get pregnant?”
Verma: “I think yes-no questions like this are a political tool.”
Good lord. I bet Verma wished she could ask Hawley some questions about his election theft fantasies.
This would be ridiculous if it weren’t so important. This week, both the Missouri and U.S. Supreme Courts are dealing with this gender-bending conundrum.
Missouri’s Supremes ruled 7-0 on the side of reality, holding that the Missouri legislature can restrict potentially dangerous medical care until scientists get on the same page about what should be done about a health problem.
Judging from the oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, people born as biological males can be restricted from playing in girls sports leagues, even if they identify as girls. That decision, to come later this year, is more likely to break along rigid ideological lines. I am waiting to see how Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson rules. She famously told Congress she isn’t expert enough to define what a girl even is.
I am inclined to be worried more about the Republicans and their electoral fantasies as we enter an election year. It is hard to overestimate the damage that can be done to our democracy by a Justice Department staffed with political appointees who share Hawley’s voting fantasies.
But you can’t dismiss the Democrats’ loopy beliefs as inconsequential. Verma isn’t some quack. She’s a board-certified OB-GYN family planning specialist and med school prof. Her whole profession has been taken over by the belief that we have to pretend men can get pregnant.
Who knows what confusion that could cause in the operating room? And doctors aren’t alone in this professionally-required belief. It is rampant among educators.
I am relieved that Americans are opting out of the two-party system whose biggest players belong locked up in an asylum for the politically deluded, but there is one little problem. As sane voters walk out, we’re leaving the most vociferously deluded in charge of the primary system that elects the candidates most likely to win the general elections. By the time sane independent voters get involved, the choice is only what flavor of delusion you’d like to put on CNN.
That’s a recipe for election-denying Josh Hawley to keep pounding the table as Democrats keep insisting that men have uteruses. As the candidates grow more extreme, who knows what reality-defying beliefs they’ll take up next. Maybe that Greenland is an urgent national security threat or something? Oh, wait …
This story was originally published January 16, 2026 at 5:08 AM.
CORRECTION: This column and headline originally misstated the number of judges on the Missouri Supreme Court.
