Khiara Bridges might be a law professor at Berkeley, but on Tuesday, Sen. Josh Hawley was teaching the lessons.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the legal aftermath of the Supreme Court overruling Roe v. Wade in June, the Missouri Republican opened up his line of questioning on an area of human biology any 10-year-old is familiar with.
And the law professor couldn’t give a straight answer.
Check out the video here. It’s got to be seen to be believed:
Hawley, a former attorney general of the Show-Me State and a skilled interrogator, started off easy:
“Professor Bridges, you’ve said several times, you’ve used a phrase, I want to make sure I understand what you mean by it. You’ve referred to ‘people with a capacity for pregnancy.’ Would that be women?”
Give credit to Hawley for keeping a straight face here. Like any good lawyer, he knew the answer to the question before he asked it. And it’s a good bet that he knew just as well that the witness was going to try to wriggle around it.
“Many women — cis women — have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy,” Bridges answered, falling back on orthodox leftist jargon that dares any doubters to see through the nonsense.
“There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as nonbinary people who are capable of pregnancy.”
Can only women get pregnant?
When Hawley suggested that that answer took abortion out of the realm of “women’s rights,” Bridges responded with the kind of answer that probably sounds masterful in a faculty lounge but is nonsense to normal human beings.
“We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups,” she said, fairly bubbling with her own cleverness. “Those things are not mutually exclusive, Sen. Hawley.”
She then accused Hawley of being “transphobic” and even inviting violence against transgender people.
Hawley wasn’t buying it.
“Wow, you’re saying that I’m opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies?”
That’s the question the left can’t answer.
They can pull dodges like then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson claiming she couldn’t define “women” because “I’m not a biologist.” They can take refuge in scary factoids, as Bridges did by throwing out the statistic that “one out of five transgender persons have attempted suicide.”
But they can’t give an answer that has been a fundamental part of the human experience since there have been humans walking the earth.
In the current political environment, cosseted by an establishment media that’s either too corrupt or too cowardly to call them on it, activists like Bridges have been able to get away with the pretense that sex is a matter of individual choice, that there are no objective differences between men and women, that human agency is the real authority rather than creation itself.
But Bridges’ semantics didn’t work with Hawley, as they wouldn’t work on any sane observer.
I’m a moderate
I’m socially liberal
I work in higher educationI think the witness is insane
She is, sadly, not at all unique in higher ed.
Her attitude towards discussion is becoming the normThe social sciences, as a respectable academic endeavor, are on life support.
— The Robber Baron (@Robber_Baron_) July 12, 2022
It’s extremely disturbing watching college level educators become visibly angered and accusatory at the point of any debate. This isn’t at all my experience when I attended college. We were encouraged to challenge and openly discuss ideas. Something has gone wrong in education.
— ? Sal (@J1262Sal) July 12, 2022
When cornered, accuse and call them names.
— M_Thomas (@M_Thomasss) July 12, 2022
So, in conclusion, only women can get pregnant.
— JPaulNorton (@JPaulNorton) July 12, 2022
There’s no doubt Bridges and her progressive colleagues thought she came away the winner of this contest — the liberal HuffPost headlined its coverage “Professor Schools Sen. Josh Hawley For His Transphobic Questions In Abortion Hearing,” while a website called LGBTQNation went with “Law professor humiliates Josh Hawley during Senate committee hearing.”
But the reality is, Hawley’s question — Do only women get pregnant? — was one Bridges couldn’t handle.
“Is this how you run your classroom?” Hawley asked. “Are students allowed to question you, or are they also treated like this?”
“We have a good time in my class. You should join,” Bridges answered. “You would learn a lot.”
“Wow, I would learn a lot,” Hawley said, with evident sarcasm. “I’ve learned a lot in this exchange. Extraordinary.”
It’s doubtful the pretentious Professor Bridges came out of it questioning her own beliefs, of course. But Americans who watched learned, once again, that the left of the 21st century is capable of denying a basic truth of existence – and deny it’s denying it.
For Hawley and the rest of the country, it was a masterclass.
