In a recent article titled, “Supreme Court remade by Trump ushers in historic defeats for civil rights,” The Washington Post frames the current conservative-leaning court as extremist, and a backward step for civil rights.

The Post compares the current Chief Justice John Roberts-led Court to the liberal-dominated Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. Tellingly, the Post presents the Warren Court, although clearly partisan to the Left, in a favorable light.

According to the article, 74% of the Warren court’s decisions favored “civil rights.” The Post observes, “Since the three Trump appointees joined the court, the share of cases won by the side advocating an expansion of civil rights fell to 44 percent.” That’s right — this too is Trump’s fault: “The court has also entered a new era of extreme partisanship. None over the past seven decades has been as starkly polarized.”

The article concedes that the Roberts Court has ruled favorably on First Amendment protections, particularly regarding religious freedom and free speech, so what are these “civil rights” losses the Post bemoans? Well, in brief, it’s a litany of hard-left woke agenda items. The Post writes:

In recent terms, a number of the civil rights cases before the court have involved protections for gay and transgender people, and in most cases, the court has ruled against them. Last year, the justices upheld a Tennessee ban on gender transition treatment for minors and allowed religious parents to remove their children from school lessons using LGBTQ+ books. In 2023, the justices said a website designer’s First Amendment rights allowed her to refuse to create sites for same-sex weddings.

It’s revealing that the article does not take issue with the Roberts Court’s decisions on the grounds of fidelity to the Constitution. No, for the Post, the issue is that the Roberts Court has not only failed to advance the Left’s radical agenda but has repeatedly thwarted it. In the examples above, civil rights were upheld — and the gender benders lost.

The fact of the matter is that the Roberts Court has engaged in many corrective measures against the liberal excesses of earlier, more left-leaning courts like the Warren Court. The Dobbs decision is the clearest example of this corrective measure in action.

The role of the judicial branch was never intended to advance political agendas. The rise of activist judges, judges who sought to create policy rather than rule on whether laws created by Congress are within the bounds of the Constitution, is solely the creation of the progressive Left.

This is why, when conservative justices issue rulings in keeping with the actual text of the Constitution, regardless of some greater political policy agenda, the Left claims they are undoing “civil rights” and “progress.”

The Supreme Court — and any court at any lower level — should be recognized for its adherence to impartiality in conformity with the Constitution. Crafting rulings in order to elevate some protected groups based upon their gender, race, or sexual minority status is not justice; indeed, it produces the opposite.

The Post’s complaint is not really about justice or injustice; rather, it is that the leftist political agenda it promotes has been thwarted by a Supreme Court that dares to uphold the Constitution impartially.