“Textualism,” Justice Gorsuch calls this.

And he has a point. His reading of the text is entirely sophomoric, but it is in its daft way literal and, if you are willing to be persuaded, persuasive. There is that niggling question of democratic legitimacy: Nobody who voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 thought he was voting for a bill to equate the situation of transgender people, of whom no one had heard of then since the word had not yet found its way into English, with the situation of African-American people, and to place the whole mess under rigorous federal monitoring. Nobody who voted for the 1964 bill was voting for that, and none of the people who voted for those representatives thought he was voting for such a thing, either. It is a law that nobody agreed to, but, if we are to credit Justice Gorsuch et al., the plain fact of it has been sitting there, awaiting discovery, since Gorsuch was toddling around his kindergarten in Denver.

This is not jurisprudence. This is magical thinking. The law says whatever the wizards in the black robes say it says, and they are not very particular about distinguishing between what it says and what they think it should say. If a few lawyers can pretend to be persuaded by an argument, and everybody who wants the outcome it would produce also can pretend to be persuaded by it, then who are you to hold out? Did you go to law school?