ROGER SIMON: Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Big Lie to Sen. Blackburn Exposes Progressivism.

When Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to define the word “woman,” during Jackson’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she got the response “I can’t.”

When Blackburn responded with an incredulous “You can’t?” Jackson replied: “Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.”

It takes a biologist to define “woman”? Does Jackson think we’re morons?

In a way, yes. Or she doesn’t care.

She’s a progressive, and progressives have been redefining language—English and many others—to fit their purposes dating back to the Spanish Civil War and undoubtedly earlier. (See Davis Hunt III at The Pamphleteer.)

Jackson very well knows what a woman is. The nominee has known this all her life, as we all have. But these days, in her part of the political world, she’s not supposed to.

So she lied.

She simply parsed her words in order not to offend a constituency that has become imbued with “transgenderitis.” By that I mean a group taking what we all know—that a small percentage of people suffer from gender dysphoria to a degree that they seek to change sexes—and extending it into absurd public policy for reasons of power and control and, ultimately, money, not to mention a completely distorted and harmful view of gender itself. (In this case, see swimmer Lia Thomas.)

Those with that form of dysphoria, as do all with serious problems, deserve our sympathy and support, but no more so than everyone else with difficulties.

Nevertheless, they’ve been singled out for now and are being manipulated and exploited by the left, just as many minorities before them have been.

The transgendered are the favored class du jour. Tomorrow—I’m sorry to tell them—it will be someone else.

In the meantime though, Blackburn’s query is “The Freeport Question of Our Time,” Steve Hayward writes at Power Line:

The “Freeport Question” refers to Abraham Lincoln’s devastating question posed to Stephen Douglas in his second debate against Douglas on August 27, 1858, held in Freeport, Illinois. The question was seemingly simple: “Can the people of a Territory in any lawful way, against the wishes of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a State constitution?”

Douglas’s answer split the Democratic Party in half, and helped to assure Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 presidential election. Douglas’s answer was Yes, a territory could exclude slavery prior to applying for statehood if the residents of the territory so chose. But the Democratic Party’s southern slave interest was demanding a federal “slave code” that would permit them to take slaves to any territory as a matter of federal legal right (a prospect made more possible by the lamentable Dred Scott decision), no matter what a majority of the residents thought. As such, Douglas’s answer was unacceptable, and so was his candidacy in 1860, which is why the Democratic Party split in half in the summer of 1860 and ran two tickets in the November election.

Today’s Freeport Question—the question that has the potential to split the Democratic Party off from a majority of voters—is: what is a woman?

Related: Matt Walsh Talks New Doc, Reveals ‘Shocking’ Answers He Received To Simple Question, ‘What Is A Woman?’