Green Bay (9-3) at Detroit (11-1)
Thursday, 8:15 p.m. EST, Amazon Prime Video.
BetMGM NFL odds: Lions by 3 1/2.
Against the spread: Packers 6-6; Lions 9-3.
Series record: Packers 106-77-7.
Last meeting: Lions beat Packers 24-14 in Green Bay on Nov. 3.
Last week: Packers beat Dolphins 30-17; Lions beat Bears 23-20.
Packers offense: overall (3), rush (5), pass (8), scoring (8).
Packers defense: overall (12), rush (8), pass (19), scoring (T-9).
Lions offense: overall (2), rush (4), pass (5), scoring (1).
Lions defense: overall (10), rush (5), pass (25), scoring (3).
Turnover differential: Packers plus-9; Lions plus-8.
WR Jayden Reed. The former Michigan State star caught five passes for 113 yards last month against the Lions. He had a career-high two TD catches against Miami. Reed leads the team with 44 catches and 693 yards receiving. Reed has seven TDs, including one rushing.
S Brian Branch. He was ejected in the second quarter of the game in Green Bay after landing a helmet-to-helmet hit on Packers receiver Bo Melton. He also was called for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for extending both of his middle fingers toward the Lambeau Field crowd as he walked off the field.
Detroit's running game against Green Bay's defense. Jahmyr Gibbs has 973 yards rushing and David Montgomery has 720 yards on the ground for the Lions and both have scored 11 combined touchdowns. The Packers allowed fewer than 45 yards rushing in each of their past two games, pulling that feat off in consecutive weeks for the first time since 1995 and second time since 1950.
Packers CB Jaire Alexander (knee) and LB Edgerrin Cooper (hamstring) are out for a third straight game. ... WR Romeo Doubs (concussion) will miss a second straight game. ... The Packers also have ruled out CB Corey Ballentine (knee). ... Detroit will play without OT Taylor Decker (shoulder), DL Josh Paschal (knee), DL Levi Onwuzurike (hamstring) and DT DJ Reader (shoulder) missed multiple practices this week. ... Lions CBs Carlton Davis (knee) and Emmanuel Moseley (hamstring) are expected to return after being inactive last week. ... LB Malcolm Rodriguez had a season-ending knee injury against Chicago.
Detroit has won five of the past six meetings, its best stretch of success in the series since the early 1980s. ... Last month in Green Bay, the Lions won after Kerby Joseph scored on a 27-yard interception return and they converted two fourth downs into touchdowns. The Packers outgained Detroit 411-261 in the setback. ... Green Bay is 2-0 against the Lions in the playoffs, beating them at home and away by four points each time in the 1993 and '94 seasons.
Detroit, Green Bay and Minnesota (10-2) are the first three three teams in a division to enter Week 14 with at least nine wins since the AFC East in 1985. ... The Packers have won their past five division road games, including a 29-22 win at Detroit last year on Thanksgiving when Jordan Love threw a 53-yard TD to Christian Watson on the game's first play and finished with three TDs. ... Green Bay coach Matt LaFleur, who is from Michigan, has won 65 regular-season games and George Siefert (75) is the only coach in league history to win more in his first six years . ... The Packers are appearing in prime time for the second of four straight games. .. Green Bay and Detroit will each play their third game in 12 days. ... Love had a career-high passer rating last week and has thrown a combined 4 TDs without an INT over the past two games. ... The Packers have scored 90 points off turnovers this season and Buffalo (91 points) is the only team with more points from a defense. ... DE Rashan Gary, drafted No. 12 overall from Michigan in 2019, has a team-high 4 1/2 sacks. Gary matched a career high with three sacks last year at Detroit, where he also forced two fumbles and recovered one. ... Packers S Xavier McKinney and Lions S Kerby Joseph are tied for the NFL lead in seven INTs — two more than any other player. ... Packers RB Josh Jacobs has 987 yards rushing to rank third in the league and Detroit’s Jahmyr Gibbs (973) is fourth entering Week 14. … The Lions clinch a playoff bid with a win or tie. They can also qualify for a spot with a setback in scenarios that include Atlanta or Tampa Bay losing. ... Detroit has won 10 straight, matching the franchise record with the 1934 team, and has won 11 of its first 12 games for the first time. ... The Lions led the league in Pro Bowl votes after the opening week with Gibbs ranking fifth among all players in voting. ... Detroit is 8-2 in prime time with coach Dan Campbell. ... Jared Goff is one of six NFL players with at least 100 TD passes with two teams, joining Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Carson Palmer, Kurt Warner and Fran Tarkenton. ... WR Amon-Ra St. Brown has 391 catches, putting him in a position to become the third player in league history to have 400 receptions in the first four years of a career, joining Michael Thomas (470 receptions) and Jarvis Landry (400). ... S Kerby Joseph has four INTs in four games against Green Bay.
St. Brown might be due for a touchdown. He has been held out of the end zone in consecutive games for the first time since Week 1 and 2. The All-Pro has nine TDs this season, including one at Green Bay when he caught all seven passes thrown to him for 56 yards.
AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/NFL
Green Bay Packers wide receiver Jayden Reed (11) runs from Miami Dolphins linebacker Jordyn Brooks (20) during a 12-yard touchdown reception in the first half of an NFL football game Thursday, Nov. 28, 2024, in Green Bay, Wis. (AP Photo/Mike Roemer)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hearing a high-profile culture-war clash, the Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed likely to uphold Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
The justices’ decision, not expected for several months, could affect similar laws enacted by another 25 states and a range of other efforts to regulate the lives of transgender people, including which sports competitions they can join and which bathrooms they can use.
The case is being weighed by a conservative-dominated court after a presidential election in which Donald Trump and his allies promised to roll back protections for transgender people, showcasing the uneasy intersection between law, politics and individual rights.
The Biden administration's top Supreme Court lawyer warned a decision favorable to Tennessee also could be used to justify nationwide restrictions on transgender healthcare for minors.
In arguments that lasted more than two hours, five of the six conservative justices voiced varying degrees of skepticism of arguments made by the administration and Chase Strangio, the ACLU lawyer for Tennessee families challenging the ban.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted in the majority in a 2020 case in favor of transgender rights, questioned whether judges, rather than lawmakers, should be weighing in on a question of regulating medical procedures, an area usually left to the states.
”The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Roberts said in an exchange with Strangio.
The court’s three liberal justices seemed firmly on the side of the challengers. But it’s not clear that any of the conservatives will go along.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor pushed back against the assertion that the democratic process would be the best way to address objections to the law. She cited a history of laws discriminating against others, noting that transgender people make up less than 1% of the U.S. population, according to studies. There are an estimated 1.3 million adults and 300,000 adolescents aged 13 to 17 who identify as transgender, according the UCLA law school's Williams Institute.
“Blacks were a much larger part of the population and it didn’t protect them. It didn’t protect women for whole centuries,” Sotomayor said in an exchange with Tennessee Solicitor General Matt Rice.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she saw some troubling parallels between arguments made by Tennessee and those advanced by Virginia and rejected by a unanimous court, in the 1967 Loving decision that legalized interracial marriage nationwide.
Quoting from the 57-year-old decision, Jackson noted that Virginia argued then that “the scientific evidence is substantially in doubt and, consequently, the court should defer to the wisdom of the state legislature.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion in 2020, said nothing during the arguments.
The arguments produced some riveting moments. Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly pressed Strangio, the first openly transgender lawyer to argue at the nation's highest court, about whether transgender people should be legally designated as a group that’s susceptible to discrimination.
Strangio answered that being transgender does fit that legal definition, though he acknowledged under Alito’s questioning there are a small number of people who de-transition. “So it's not an immutable characteristic, is it?” Alito said.
Strangio did not retreat from his view, though he said the court did not have to decide the issue to resolve the case in his clients' favor.
There were dueling rallies outside the court in the hours before the arguments. Speeches and music filled the air on the sidewalk below the court’s marble steps. Advocates of the ban bore signs like “Champion God’s Design” and “Kids Health Matters,” while the other side proclaimed “Fight like a Mother for Trans Rights” and “Freedom to be Ourselves."
Four years ago, the court ruled in favor of Aimee Stephens, who was fired by a Michigan funeral home after she informed its owner that she was a transgender woman. The court held that transgender people, as well as gay and lesbian people, are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace.
The Biden administration and the families and health care providers who challenged the Tennessee law urged the justices to apply the same sort of analysis that the majority, made up of liberal and conservative justices, embraced in the case four years ago when it found that “sex plays an unmistakable role” in employers' decisions to punish transgender people for traits and behavior they otherwise tolerate.
The issue in the Tennessee case is whether the law violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which requires the government to treat similarly situated people the same.
Tennessee's law bans puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors, but allows the same drugs to be used for other purposes.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the administration's top Supreme Court lawyer, called the law sex-based line drawing to ban the use of drugs that have been safely prescribed for decades and said the state “decided to completely override the views of the patients, the parents, the doctors.”
She contrasted the Tennessee law with one enacted by West Virginia, which set conditions for the health care for transgender minors, but stopped short of an outright ban.
Rice countered that lawmakers acted to regulate “risky, unproven medical interventions” and, at one point, likened the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments to lobotomies and eugenics, now thoroughly discredited but once endorsed by large segments of the medical community.
Rice argued that the Tennessee law doesn’t discriminate based on sex, but rather based on the purpose of the treatment. Children can get puberty blockers to treat early onset puberty, but not as a treatment for gender dysphoria.
“Our fundamental point is there is no sex-based line here,” Rice said.
While the challengers invoked the 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County for support, Tennessee relied on the court's precedent-shattering Dobbs decision in 2022 that ended nationwide protections for abortion and returned the issue to the states.
The two sides battled in their legal filings over the appropriate level of scrutiny the court should apply. It's more than an academic exercise.
The lowest level is known as rational basis review and almost every law looked at that way is ultimately upheld. Indeed, the federal appeals court in Cincinnati that allowed the Tennessee law to be enforced held that lawmakers acted rationally to regulate medical procedures, well within their authority.
The appeals court reversed a trial court that employed a higher level of review, heightened scrutiny, that applies in cases of sex discrimination. Under this more searching examination, the state must identify an important objective and show that the law helps accomplish it.
If the justices opt for heightened scrutiny, they could return the case to the appeals court to apply it. That's the course Prelogar and Strangio pushed for on Wednesday, though there did not seem to be much support for it.
Gender-affirming care for youth is supported by every major medical organization, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association.
But Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh all highlighted a point made by Tennessee in its legal briefs claiming that health authorities in Sweden, Finland, Norway and the United Kingdom found that the medical treatments "pose significant risks with unproven benefits.”
If those countries “are pumping the brakes on this kind of treatment," Kavanaugh said, why should the Supreme Court question Tennessee's actions?
None of those countries has adopted a ban similar to the one in Tennessee and individuals can still obtain treatment, Prelogar said.
Kavanaugh, who has coached his daughters’ youth basketball teams, also wondered whether a ruling against Tennessee would give transgender athletes "a constitutional right to participate in girls' sports.”
Prelogar said a narrow decision would not affect the sports issue.
Associated Press writers Lindsay Whitehurst, Andrew DeMillo in Little Rock, Arkansas, Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville, Tennessee contributed to this report.
FILE - Sara Ramirez, from left, Laverne Cox and Chase Strangio, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, pose for a photo outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Oct. 8, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
Transgenders rights supporters rally outside of the Supreme Court, Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
A young person who preferred not to give her name, cheers as supporters of transgender rights rally by the Supreme Court, Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024, in Washington, as arguments begin in a case regarding a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Supporters of transgender rights Sarah Kolick, left, of Cleveland, and Derek Torstenson, of Colorado Springs, Colo., right, rally by the Supreme Court, Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024, in Washington, while arguments are underway in a case regarding a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. Behind the two are people who support the ban. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti talks to reporters outside of the Supreme Court, Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
FILE - ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, left, and plaintiff Joaquin Carcano address reporters after a hearing, June 25, 2018, in Winston-Salem, N.C., on their lawsuit challenging the law that replaced North Carolina's "bathroom bill." Carcano and other transgender plaintiffs argue the new law continues to discourage transgender people from using restrooms that match their gender identity. (AP Photo/Jonathan Drew, File)
Demonstrators against transgenders rights protest during a rally outside of the Supreme Court, Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024, in Washington, as arguments begin in a case regarding a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
FILE - Julia Williams holds a sign in counterprotest during a rally in favor of a ban on gender-affirming health care legislation, Monday, March 20, 2023, at the Missouri Statehouse in Jefferson City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)
FILE - People attend a rally as part of a Transgender Day of Visibility, Friday, March 31, 2023, by the Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
The Supreme Court is framed by the columns of the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2024. T (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
