by Jordan B. Rickards, www.RickardsReview.com

In another sign that the liberal half of our government has gone completely off the deep end, a federal judge in Massachusetts has ruled that taxpayers must pay for the sex change operation of an incarcerated murderer.

The plaintiff in this action, Robert Kosilek, who was convicted of murdering his wife in 1990, convinced Judge Mark Wolf that for the Department of Corrections not to pay for his procedure would be a violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Ah yes.  This recalls the famous constitutional conflict between founding fathers James Madison and George Mason, debating the provisions of the proposed Bill of Rights, and ultimately determining that, yes, in fact, they intended their new American Experiment to include a government entitlement to taxpayer funded, elective, sexual mutilations for prisoners.  How could we have missed that all these years?  Life, liberty, and a right to subsidized sexual degeneracy for murderers.

That’s right folks.  You probably thought it was bad enough you have to finance $3000 annually for contraceptives for women like activist Sandra Fluke (pronounced “fluck”) who just can’t keep their knees together.  Now we have a new constitutional right to $20,000 sex change operations for criminals who can’t deal with the reality of their reproductive organ.

You know, sometimes I think liberals go out of their way to make their arguments as inane as possible, as though to overwhelm their opponents with a tidal wave of ridiculousness that makes it almost impossible for a challenger to know where to begin.

Well, let’s try starting with the mundane.

For one thing, the Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” not “cruel orunusual punishments.” So to be constitutionally prohibited, the protested policy must be both.  But it is not “unusual” for the State not to pay for someone else’s sex change operation, much less that of an inmate.  Judge Wolf’s ruling is believed to be the first of its kind, meaning that, if anything, it’s his ruling, and the new entitlement that it provides, that are “unusual.”

Secondly, one of the basic canons of statutory interpretations instructs judgesnot to interpret a law in such a way as to reach an absurd result.  Wolf’s holding violates that principal many, many times over, most obviously because since the Eighth Amendment is specific to prisoners, Wolf grants a government entitlement to criminals that the Constitution does not provide to law abiding citizens.  A careless oversight on James Madison’s part, no doubt.

But we won’t have to wait long for a remedy!  Already, a US Tax Court in (where else?) Massachusetts has determined that sex change operations are tax deductible because they are “medically necessary.” And if they’re medically necessary, the next logical step is for the government to require insurance companies to provide them, resulting in the rest of us paying for them through higher premiums.  In fact, that’s precisely what Sandra Fluke argued for in a paper in 2011, complaining as she did that “Transgender persons wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies” which do not cover such procedures.

That’s right, “heterosexist.” Not “homophobic,” which, along with “racist,” has been so overused as to have been stripped of any meaning.  Now, because liberals need an even more ambiguous slander with more tread on the tires, we’re all “heterosexist.”

And if you’re asking yourself “What the Fluke does heterosexist mean?”, you’re not alone.

I guess it means that rational people are not allowed to point out the obvious — the charge of bigotry rendering logical discussion not only moot, but irredeemably hateful — which is that gender identity disorder is not, in any real sense, a life-threatening condition.  It’s a lifestyle condition, and private citizens should pay for their own lifestyle choices.  Heck, prisoners shouldn’t even have lifestyles!

Judge Wolf disagrees, and that’s no surprise.  He says the condition is life-threatening because “the anguish alone constitutes a serious medical need.  It also places [the prisoner] at high risk of killing himself if his major mental illness is not adequately treated.”

Of course, if Kosilek’s really suicidal (a highly suspect proposition considering he has been able to not kill himself for the twelve years that this lawsuit had been kicking around the courts), then the prison should do what is done with every other “suicidal” prisoner, and put him on a suicide watch.  Wrap him in a straight jacket if you have to.  Lock him in a padded cell.

But no, that’s so yesterday, so unenlightened, that only heterosexist backwater rubes who go to church could think that way.  Modernity demands the belief that the State is committing cruel and unusual punishment when a prisoner chooses to kill himself because he is displeased with his anatomy.  Therefore, it logically follows that the Constitution must also require us to pay for breast implants for criminals with body dysmorphic disorders, and penile implants for inmates with sexual inadequacy complexes, rather than provide the obvious mental health treatment that these seriously disturbed people clearly require and which would be in their best interests.

The murderer, seemingly taking a page from Fluke’s paper, argues that a sex change operation (or if you prefer the less heterosexist term, “gender re-assignment therapy”) is different than cosmetic surgery.  He says “People in the prisons who have bad hearts, hips or knees have surgery to repair those things.  My medical needs are no less important or more important than the person in the cell next to me.” But his case isn’t analogous to that.  There is an obvious difference between needing a surgery because of a defective organ, and wanting an unnecessary surgery because of defective thinking.

And this brings us to the most operative question this imbecilic holding raises, one that often gets avoided when discussing sex change “therapy.” Judge Wolf, in a moment of careless heterosexism, called gender identity disorder a “major mental illness.” There can be no serious doubt that it is.  But why, if it’s a mental illness, are we treating the organ between the patient’s legs and not the organ between his ears?

Granted, it’s not politically correct to suggest such a thing, but we have a bad habit in this country of rushing toward answers without establishing what the real problem is, in part because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.  But we’re not helping anyone by avoiding this conversation, nor by ignoring the obvious inconsistencies in the arguments of the Left regarding the efficacy of mental health treatment for sexual degeneracies.  When it comes to pedophiles, the Left says that they’re actually victims of their own condition.  And because they’re victims they shouldn’t be punished, or even stigmatized, but instead treated with mental health counseling, and then released without any kind of monitoring by law enforcement.  But when it comes to someone wanting to emasculate himself to become a member of the opposite sex, the Left says mental health counseling is ineffective, and it’s implied that it’s also hateful even to suggest.

In other words, the Left’s only consistency in these matters is, in all circumstances, to accommodate the degeneracy in hopes of normalizing the conduct.

It’s not just about criminals, or private adults, either.  Parents are having sex change operations for children as young as 8.  Forget whether taxpayers will eventually have to pay for that.  What kind of lives are these kids going to live with their reproductive organ destroyed, their gender identity altered, and the underlying cause unaddressed?  What kind of society have we created that we now have parents who would victimize their own children in such a way?

This is the world that political correctness creates.  Parents used to correct children.  Now they have them fixed.

A “therapy,” by definition, cures a disease or disorder.  A sex change operation, or gender reassignment therapy, or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t cure any condition, it only accommodates and normalizes it.  And the very notion that such a procedure is not only medically necessary, but a human entitlement, demonstrates an even greater mental condition that afflicts more Americans every day.  It’s called “liberalism,” and it is characterized by a deep decline into the absurd, and the consequential victimization of those it purports to help at the expense of everyone else.