Rod Dreher's Blog, page 573

Trump & The Left’s Identity Politics

I think Donald Trump’s whining about the ethnicity of the Hispanic judge in his Trump University case is shameful, and yet another example of his gross immaturity and narcissism. It is dangerous to have a presidential candidate openly question whether a judge can be fair because of his ethnic background.

That said, is this not what the Left does constantly, and has done for a long time? Claim that members of minority groups must have special privileges, because it is impossible for a white-majority society to be fair to them, on account of the majority being white, cisgendered and heterosexist?

For example, New York City is funding a summer jobs program … but it’s more than a jobs program. As the reader who sent me that link said:

Everything, and I mean everything, is now about LGBT acceptance. Check out this story about the youth employment program in New York City. It seems like it’s actually a political re-education camp thinly disguises as a jobs program.

Businesses cannot participate unless they pledge to be allies. And the companies get special training to teach them how to be allies.

It’s a jobs program. Despite my libertarian leanings I have no problem with that. Teach a kid to work? OK. But they don’t even interview because it would allow someone to kinda maybe discriminate against LGBT kids. So they are being trained to know that… jobs just materialize. You get them. Without interviews.

Can anybody seriously doubt that a Hillary Clinton presidency will mean four more years of privileging approved Democratic Party grievance groups in law and policy? Trump’s childish caterwauling is obvious for what it is, but in principle, how is it different from left-liberals demanding special treatment because whites cannot be trusted to be fair?

If Trump’s whining about the Latino judge strikes you as racist and unjust, well, welcome to how many conservatives see the sham “diversity” ideology of contemporary liberalism.

It is deeply alarming to see institution after institution falling before this ideology. In Seattle, Matteo Ricci College has just placed Jodi Kelly, its dean, on paid leave while it investigates whether or not she has been sufficiently sensitive to the Diverse:

After three weeks of Seattle U repeatedly stating it would not remove Kelly from her station, the MRC Coalition sees her being placed on leave as a win, Smith said, but Kelly continuing to receive salary is still an indicator of Seattle U’s support for her. There is also the potential for Kelly to be reinstated.

Following the announcement of Kelly’s leave, the MRC Coalition spent Wednesday night crafting a list of candidates and the desired qualifications they’d like to see from an interim dean.

“A woman of color would be phenomenal and something we derive,” Mohammad said.

But the protesters are unhappy not to be consulted over Kelly’s replacement:

“By not asking for the input of the coalition, it’s already decentering people of color,” Smith said, adding there are “loose ends” to tie up before the coalition considers ending its sit-in. “It will happen by the end of the school year.”

Mohammad said “Phase 2” for the coalition involves working with administrators to review and make positive changes to the college’s curriculum, which the group has criticized as being too Eurocentric and in need of diversification.

“We’re really entering Phase 2 of our organizing,” she said.

What have they been protesting at the Catholic college? From the MRC’s original statement:

Once again, these concerns are urgent and necessitate an immediate response, to be handled with utmost severity and care. Dissatisfaction, traumatization, and boredom are realities within our collective MRC experiences, as well as being ridiculed, traumatized, othered, tokenized, and pathologized. These experiences have been profoundly damaging and erasing, with lasting effects on our mental and emotional well-being. Additionally, the curriculum in MRC is unsatisfactory as a Humanities program. For students to have their personal and ancestral voices erased in curriculum and conversation, only to be told that their experiences of pain are insignificant, is psychologically abusive.

In light of this college environment, multiple cohorts of students in both the Humanities for Teaching and Humanities for Leadership majors have joined together to write our truths and demand systemic change.

The Humanities program as it exists today ignores and erases the humanity of its students and of peoples around the globe. Humanity is defined as the human race, and as such studies in humanity must be about human beings collectively. We are diverse, with many different life experiences, also shaped by colonization, U.S. and Western imperialism, neo-liberal politics, and oppression under racist, sexist, classist, heteronormative and homophobic, trans*phobic, queerphobic, ableist, nationalistic, xenophobic systems, which perpetuate conquest, genocide of indigenous peoples, and pervasive systemic inequities. The world in which we live, and the realities of students at Seattle University are vastly complex and worthy of critical study. Our concerns regarding racism, sexism, homophobia, and other manifestations of oppression are not individualized–they are systematically upheld by the college.

It is to appease these barbarians that the authorities at that college sacrificed their dean. The remaining administrators at Matteo Ricci College and its parent institution, Seattle University, deserve whatever they get from now on.

Crude as he is, Trump seems to get in ways that no other senior Republican gets is the degree to which American politics, cultural and otherwise, have become about raw racial and demographic power. I suppose you could plausibly argue that they always have been, but at least most of us tried to argue in classical liberal terms for a more fair and just society. What Trump seems to be saying is, “And look where that got you, white people.”

Again, this is a dangerous thing to say in a pluralistic democracy, and it troubles me deeply that Trump says it. On the other hand, there is some truth in it. For years I’ve been saying that the militant identity politics practiced by the Left is sooner or later going to call up the same thing on the Right. I do not celebrate this, no how, no way. But then, I have been objecting for years to the way the Left plays this grievance game, especially in the news media. They have played their part in the rise of Trump. They still do.

Another Ben Op Know-Nothing

Why do I bother? Because I’m a masochist. Shaun Kenney at Ethika Politika today:

This is my problem with the Benedict Option in a nutshell:

The Benedict Option is about forming communities that teach us and help us to live in such a way that our entire lives are witnesses to the transforming power of the Gospel.

This statement is totally meaningless. The Church does this. Why do we need a Benedict Option?

In what dream world does the church do this?  Some parish churches do this. The “church” — Catholic and otherwise — doesn’t do this. It is supposed to do this, but by and large it doesn’t. If you said, “The Benedict Option sounds like nothing more than the church being the church,” I would say yes, that’s mostly it. Be the church! But the church — I’m referring to the institutional church in all branches of Christianity — hasn’t acted like the church in a long time. Which is why we are in such a mess. Which is why Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the de facto religion of American Christians. Which is why Americans who identify as Evangelical divorce at a higher rate than the US average, and why 40 percent of US Catholics oppose their own church’s teaching on abortion, and 70 percent oppose their own church’s teaching on homosexuality. It is almost certainly true in both cases that well-formed Evangelicals and Catholics are more faithful in belief and practice to Christian norms, but the fact that there are so many nominal Christians surely says something about the ineffectiveness of the institutional church.

(And before anybody rushes to their keyboards to say, “Butwhatabout Orthodoxy, huh? Why are you not criticizing your church,” let me say that I have no reason to believe that Orthodox Christianity in the US is in any better shape. It varies from parish to parish. There is not nearly as much research on Orthodox America as Evangelical and Catholic America, because there are so few Orthodox Christians. Nearly every critical thing I say about the state of Christianity in America also applies to members of my own communion.)

I wonder if Kenney has talked, as I have, to numerous professors at both Catholic and Evangelical colleges who tell me that their students arrive knowing next to nothing about the faith. Since Ethika Politika is a Catholic website, let me focus on the state of young Catholics. Christian Smith is a Catholic, a Notre Dame professor, and one of the leading sociologists of religion in the US. He has written a book on the spirituality of young Catholics. He says: “The situation regarding Catholic youth and the church is indeed very grim.”

About American Christianity in general, Smith says:

Reflections: What does religion mean to people these days?

Smith: In the emerging adult years, what many think about “religion” is: It’s just not something that matters to them. Religion is seen as something they might take an interest in later in life, like life insurance. They aren’t angry about it. It’s just given a presupposed dismissal.

Reflections: Wasn’t it always this way with rising generations?

Smith : I’m not a good-old-days sociologist, but I do think former generations were religiously more engaged, more literate. The digital, social media revolution has created a new world. It affects what young people’s eyes are focused on – the world of screens – and what matters to them and how they form community. Technology has consequences for epistemology, the nature of authority and trust.

Reflections: Can churches be a counterforce?

Smith: Yes, churches ought to be able to create an alternative community, an open-handed community where people can encounter each other, network, and hear a different word, but without necessarily being expected to sign up as members for the next 30 years. People are sucked into the dominant culture, but many sense the dominant culture isn’t ultimately fulfilling. They know mass consumer capitalism isn’t enough. Churches are in a position to confirm this hunch.

Young people – teens – are under incredible pressure to perform. Intense expectations are placed on them. As a colleague of mine has suggested, social media appears to be all about social performance, creating a personality that isn’t real, and teens are experiencing a deep unhappiness about this. I think churches are in a position to create a social space where people can be accepted for who they are and not be expected to perform. I’ve seen some congregations that do this.

Reflections: Still, you find apathy about church.

Smith: If there’s one thing I know about younger people, whether they are 13 or 28, nearly every last one of them thinks of Christianity as a set of rules and regulations, do’s and don’ts. They aren’t necessarily fighting against that. That’s simply what they think Christianity is – a set of moralisms. The church is a place of moralistic requirements.

And that’s very understandable. Parents want their kids to turn out okay, and they rely on the church for moral guidance so they learn to behave. Parents are trying to cope with a world where lots of things can go wrong. There are lots of threats. But I think it can lead to a form of idolatry to treat the church this way. I feel for pastors. They are faced with this expectation from parents.

Smith says he doesn’t “blame” the church, and doesn’t really blame young people either. He says that we are living in radically different times, where the old ways don’t work:

In the mid-20th century you could say there was a map in place that helped organize society. It featured well-defined units – family, religion, education, government, the military. Each had boundaries. Each had a role and respected the others. But those boundaries have broken down. The map isn’t in place. All of life is now being ordered by narratives and images that don’t reflect the old boundaries. Churches have something to say about this. They should go back again and again to the drinking well of the gospel and offer a true alternative transcendent story. If they can’t do that, if they remain saddled with moralism, then they better hang it up now.

 

 

Read the whole thing. 

Shaun Kenney continues:

Proponents of the Benedict Option would perhaps offer us the solutions of “hard” and “soft” options, contrasting a series of crunchy Christians scratching out a living on a distributist co-op with a much more charitable and accurate view of a parish emphasizing the Liturgy of the Hours and a more Benedictine charism. Yet that softer variant exists today within many families; it is how our grandparents worshiped and prayed. Do such mores really require the communitarianism more familiar to “revolutionary Aristotelians” whose ears are attuned to the irresistible siren song of conflict as an inevitable feature of history? Again, we come back to the core problem of the Benedict Option in esse: either it is a vertical and closed call to retreat, or it is a horizontal and open call back to the prayer life of the Church. The latter seems reasonable, the former much more in line with tradition.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, this again. If people would make even a slight effort to read what I’ve actually written — here’s the Benedict Option FAQ — we could have a real argument about this stuff, instead of arguing about someone’s distorted idea.

If you won’t take it from me, take this recent summation by Alan Jacobs:

The Benedict Option, as I understand it, is based on three premises.

The dominant media of our technological society are powerful forces for socializing people into modes of thought and action that are often inconsistent with, if not absolutely hostile to, Christian faith and practice.
In America today, churches and other Christian institutions (schools at all levels, parachurch organizations with various missions) are comparatively very weak at socializing people, if for no other reason than that they have access to comparatively little mindspace.
Healthy Christian communities are made up of people who have been thoroughly grounded in, thoroughly socialized into, the the historic practices and beliefs of the Christian church.

From these three premises proponents of the Benedict Option draw a conclusion: If we are to form strong Christians, people with robust commitment to and robust understanding of the Christian life, then we need to shift the balance of ideological power towards Christian formation, and that means investing more of our time and attention  than we have been spending on strengthening our Christian institutions.

I have more work to do to put more meat on the bones, so to speak, but there is enough out there in the public square now to have an actual meaningful discussion, if people are genuinely interested in doing so. As I told a Catholic critic this past weekend, I prefer the flawed work I’m doing trying to address a situation that actually exists than the work he is not doing, which ignores the reality small-o orthodox Christianity faces in 21st century America.

UPDATE: This blogger at Perceptio has his (her?) head in the game. Excerpt:

It is possible that the thrust of the past decade or so is part of a generational shift. In which case, one need only wait for the pendulum to swing back the other way. It is equally as possible that the West is heading for the point of cultural exhaustion that brought Rome to ruin – it is simply a matter of waiting it out until a new beginning. In either scenario, the immediate need remains for Christianity to determine a way forward as a counter cultural phenomenon running parallel to the dominant culture and offering a contrary moral code and conception of reality. With this in mind, I believe Dreher hits the nail on the head – the secular state realigned the terms and conditions upon which Christianity engages the culture. It is only fair that Christianity realign the terms and conditions upon which the culture deals with Christianity.

The culture war is lost. It is time to become counter-culture. This will only happen with a radical re-appropriation of the ethos of the first three centuries: the praxis of Christian life in defiance to the desire of the state.

Anti-Trump Mob Runs Amok

This infuriates me. Here, on the LA Times site, is footage of Donald Trump supporters being beaten up in San Jose outside the rally. In America. Peaceful supporters of a presidential candidate cannot go to hear him speak without mobs attacking them.

Here are a few tweets from a CNN reporter on the scene to give you a sense of what’s happening there:

Protesters cornering Trump supporters as they leave. This woman taunted them. They cornered her & threw eggs at her pic.twitter.com/MiDGDBkKIo

— Sara Murray (@SaraMurray) June 3, 2016

Protesters also cornered a couple who were NOT antagonizing them. They closed in on the couple, threw water at them and spit in their faces.

— Sara Murray (@SaraMurray) June 3, 2016

Protesters are spilling into the street and blocking traffic. One is burning an American flag. Others chanting "whose streets?!"

— Sara Murray (@SaraMurray) June 3, 2016

Trump supporter gets sucker punched. He later identified the man he believes punched him & police arrested the man https://t.co/NiL7GiwJ9R

— Sara Murray (@SaraMurray) June 3, 2016

Look at this, from Buzzfeed’s correspondent on the scene:

Cops standing by as a trump supporter is chased by protesters pic.twitter.com/dAcImJBwok

— john r stanton (@dcbigjohn) June 3, 2016

Mob burns American flag:

Protests have moved out onto San Carlos st pic.twitter.com/0JmUTmZP9c

— john r stanton (@dcbigjohn) June 3, 2016

Cops not protecting an American citizen being chased by a mob for attending a rally for a presidential candidate:

More police standing by as a trump supporter is chased pic.twitter.com/d7nQca1kWH

— john r stanton (@dcbigjohn) June 3, 2016

Protesters are throwing rocks at the cops, even as their numbers dwindle

— john r stanton (@dcbigjohn) June 3, 2016

Yeah, that’s just what we need: to let people who throw rocks at cops to rule the streets.

Whose country is this, anyway?



That deranged Latino mob in San Jose just convinced a hell of a lot of people to buy tickets to the Trump train.

View From Your Table

Sydney, Australia

Writes the reader:

From The Centre, a B&B at a former convent in Sydney. Vegemite involves a learning curve for Americans.

And this from our regular commenter Giuseppe Scalas:

The town is San Teodoro, in Sardinia. Giuseppe writes:

The restaurant sources its fish from its own salt-water lagoon, on which it is situated.

Octopus salad

Mussels marinière

Gilthead sea bream catalan style

Mullet roe with fruit salad

Raw tuna with walnuts and pine nuts

Ricotta cheese mousse with grated tuna roe

Tuna roe bruschetta

Breaded vegetables

And this is just the entrées. The rest of the meal included spaghetti with clams, roasted fish and prawns, dessert, fruit, coffee and liquors.

Cover your ears, O sailor, lest the sirens’ song diverts you from your course.

Happy day!

Goodbye, Arctic Ice

Good lord.

What’s the ‘Laurus’ Of The Protestants

My friend Jesse Cone asks:

Question: If Laurus is to Orthodoxy what The Power and the Glory is to Roman Catholicism, what’s the analogous novel for Protestantism?

Readers?

Sexually Fluid America

A new study shows that Americans are four times more accepting of gay sex than they were 25 years ago, and twice as likely to have it themselves. Unsurprisingly, the Millennials are driving this. And what’s driving the Millennials? Excerpt:

But all of these factors — the increased acceptance, the increased behavior  and the trend toward sexual fluidity — make Twenge think she knows the real driving force behind this cultural shift: We care more about ourselves. She believes this comes from an increased sense of individualism.

“Some thinkers have made the case that individualism has been increasing in Western culture since the Renaissance, but that this change accelerated beginning around 1965 or 1970,” she explained. As societies become more comfortable in terms of resource availability, one doesn’t need to worry as much about fitting in to the rules and expectations of the larger group.

“Think about what an enormous group effort it used to be to make a meal. Now you just need two bucks and a microwave,” Twenge said. This security means less motivation to follow cultural “rules” that don’t suit an individual’s personal desires.

And that individualism could make us more tolerant, too.

“Individualism says basically that you do what you want to do and let other people do what they want to do,” she said. “People are more willing to accept behaviors they have no wish to engage in. There’s more of a sense of, you know, I need to do what’s right for me.”

Read the whole thing.  It really is Anthony Kennedy’s world:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

Justice Kennedy, in those 1992 words, stated something that is at the core of the modern American sensibility. It is past time for conservatives to get over our tic of blaming every social change we don’t like on the judiciary. I agree entirely that the Supreme Court has been, on balance, a malevolent force for destructive social change. But we can now see that Justice Kennedy was more in touch with America than we were, and are.

This story is yet another milestone in the moral disintegration and cultural collapse of America. But you knew I would say that. I would just point out that Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman, in his 1947 sociological history Family And Civilization, said this was one of the marks of a declining civilization (it was observed in Greece and Rome near the end of their lives). When expressive individualism becomes the guiding principle of a people’s understanding of sex and sexuality, it becomes far more difficult to form stable families. The State will grow ever more powerful as it is called on to do the work that families used to do.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: Christians who allow this rotten culture to catechize them and their children are going to lose their faith. There is no choice but to withdraw into our own institutions and communities, where we can form the next generations. I was e-mailing earlier today with a well-known public intellectual who is a committed Christian. I often wonder how he manages to find the strength to take on the battles he fights in the public square. I found out from him today that he has a long history of youth formation within thick Christian communities. Of course he does. He works in the heat of battle in the public square. He would have been wiped out long ago if not for his formation in the faith.

The same is true for us and our children. You have been warned.

Principal, Priest, Dirty Book Writer

A throwdown is underway in Tallahassee between some Catholic parents and their bishop:

The Rev. Roy C Marien will be installed as John Paul II Catholic High School president on July 1. The Panhandle priest has written two novels that some parents find vulgar for their use of slang and the sexual depiction of teenage girls.

They say the books provide “entrée into the author’s mind” and when they look they see things, they say, should disqualify Marien for a leadership position around children, especially given the sex abuse scandal plaguing the Roman Catholic Church.

On Wednesday, Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee Bishop Gregory Parkes sent a letter to all of the school’s parents noting the books are fiction. He also pointed out in his 31-year career Marien has never faced allegations of inappropriate behavior with children or young people.

More:

A blurb for SamRajni of Pemako, an Afghanistan war story, says the characters “either endear you or creep you out.” It contains a description of how the Northwest Florida sun had tanned a 13-year old’s “milky iridescent skin with a café au lait hue.”

“Stella displays her beauty with sharp looking clothes, tastefully displaying enough cleavage control,” is how Marien described a teen hiding a “lust for power” with “deceptive charm.”

In Black Swan Chronicles, a collection of three stories exploring love, Marien uses the four-letter slang word for excrement 34 times, “sex” 22 times and mentions “orgasm” seven times.

“Kiwi experienced an intense pre-orgasm knot coiling deep in the core of her being,” wrote Marien about the lead character in the first story. “When it was released it was less of a physical sensation as she had remembered from her days of prostitution.”

The reader who sent me the link is an angry Catholic parent. She writes:

Apparently, these novels caused a stir at his previous parish, but the incident did not make the news.  This would lead one to assume, however, that the bishop knew about them.  Maybe the bishop did not know; but a Google search of the priest’s name immediately turns up these novels, so if the bishop and superintendent were ignorant, they should not have been.

Many of the parents are angry and upset – I mean, how do you send a 14 year old girl to school with this guy there?  And how are you supposed to teach your children right from wrong, and not to look at porn, when this guy is in charge in any way?  But many of the parents also do not have another place to turn – this is the only Christian high school in Tallahassee.

There is no excuse for the content.  The bishop seems COMPLETELY ignorant of the fact that the ends (an uplifting story?) do not justify the means (disgusting filth).

This is disgusting.  The bishop, however, seems to be digging in.  How are you supposed to stay Catholic? … Do you or your readers have any ideas at all for what we can do?

I don’t have a hard and fast objection to a priest writing a novel that has in it sexual content. It’s part of the human condition, after all. But a priest writing about sexually active, smokin’ hot teenagers experiencing intense pre-orgasm knots in charge of a Catholic high school. Erm, no. How imprudent can a priest be to do such a thing in this day and age?

Maybe Bishop Parkes hasn’t noticed, but the Catholic Church has a credibility problem having to do with priests being sexually active with minors, and bishops turning a blind eye to its seriousness.

I don’t know what Catholic parents in this situation should do, but I welcome readers’ input. But this is as good a place as any to make a point I’m going to make more explicitly in my Benedict Option book: parents who are sitting around waiting for the institutional church to get something usefully countercultural and authentically, uncompromisingly Catholic going are wasting valuable time. It’s not going to happen. Do it yourselves. You can’t count on church bureaucrats to do the right thing in cases like this, or even to know what the right thing to do is.

Fifteen years ago, a Catholic priest friend of mine got tired of hearing another friend and me bitching and moaning about what the institutional Catholic church was doing wrong. “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “But that’s no excuse for being passive. My parents raised me in the Seventies, when the Church lost its mind. They catechized my siblings and me themselves. You have resources available to you that they could only have dreamed of. Get busy!”

Necessity is the mother of invention. The times we’re in now, and are heading into, will require faithful orthodox Catholics, and all traditionalist Christians, to learn what it means to be what Pope Benedict XVI called a “creative minority.”

 

If By ‘Gulag’, You Mean Irrelevance

Here’s an Open Letter To The American People signed by “writers [who] are particularly aware of the many ways that language can be abused in the name of power.” What do they wish to convey to their countrymen? That:

we, the undersigned, as a matter of conscience, oppose, unequivocally, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump for the Presidency of the United States.

Golly. That should do him in.

It’s amusing to contemplate the chasm between the power these writers think they have in our popular culture, and the power they actually have. You can write anything you want in American culture, and nobody much cares. We don’t have a Havel or a Solzhenitsyn — writers whose words mattered — because there’s nothing at stake in the lives of our writers. They are taking no risks in signing a petition denouncing Donald Trump — and hey, I think we should be glad that we live in a society in which a writer can denounce a presidential candidate without drawing retribution to himself.

But come on. Really, writers? A manifesto contra Trump? I’m reminded of these lines of Walker Percy, about the political role of the American writer, whose opinions on such matters move nobody, because only other writers take writers seriously as wise men and women on public matters:

He is like the wretched man in Dostovesky’s Notes From Underground, who swore to get even with his enemy by walking directly toward him on the sidewalk and forcing him to yield and who at the last second yields himself, without the other even noticing.

The kind of people who would care about an “Open Letter To The American People” instructing them to shun Trump are the kind of people who would never in a million years vote for the guy. But what do I know? I will print out copies of this Open Letter, signed by people 99 percent of America has never heard of, and leaflet local trailer parks.

Aleksandar Hemon, a writer who hates Trump, writes about why he didn’t sign the letter. Excerpt:

One has a hard time recalling a novel that has forcefully addressed the iniquities of the post 9/11 era: the lies, the crimes, the torture, the financial collapse, not to mention Americans’ complicity in all those glories, including the fact that Bush had approval ratings reaching the nineties on the eve of the Iraq invasion. If some future historian attempts to determine what occupied the American writers’ minds since the beginning of the millennium by reading all the Pulitzer Prize fiction winners between 2002 and 2016, s/he would find few traces of Bush, or Iraq, or Abu Ghraib, or Cheney, or the financial collapse, or indeed any politics. Apart from The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has some things to say about American exceptionalism, the closest to political engagement a recent Pulitzer winner comes is by way of North Korea, the setting for Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, addressing the outrageous misdeeds of a reassuringly non-American regime.

There is a good case—literary or not—to be made for ideological continuity between the Bushite and the Trumpite America, but exposing that evolution would require a lot of writing, which might interfere with all the open letters re: present calamity that clamor to be written.

Hemon has their number: denunciation is easy; writing is hard. The thing that’s funny about this Open Letter is not that the writers denounce Trump. Lots of people feel that way about Trump. It’s that they do so as writers, with a sense of solemnity and dignity that is quite comic, considering that there will be no consequences for them taking this stand (no FBI agent at the door, no loss of jobs or status), and because for better or for worse, almost no Americans take seriously what novelists have to say on politics seriously. These scribes might as well have signed a document calling for the restoration of the Hapsburgs. Still, it’s delicious, in kind of a mean way, to imagine the gravity with which the drafters of the Open Letter went about their work, and with which its signatories pledged their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor to affix their names to it.

Transgender McCarthyism

Last week, Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk wrote a piece for The New Yorker online saying that the Obama administration’s recent transgender “guidance” for bathrooms, locker rooms, etc., could well create a Title IX crisis. Excerpt:

But there is also a growing sense that some females will not feel safe sharing bathrooms, shower rooms, or locker rooms with males. And if a female student claimed that a bathroom or locker room that her school had her share with male students caused her to feel sexually vulnerable and created a hostile environment, the complaint would be difficult to dismiss, particularly since the federal government has interpreted Title IX broadly and said that schools must try to prevent a hostile environment. This is not wholly hypothetical. Brandeis University found a male student responsible for sexual misconduct for looking at his boyfriend’s genitals while both were using a communal school shower. The disciplined student then sued the school for denying him basic fairness in its disciplinary process, and a federal court recently refused to dismiss the suit.

Continuing to have segregated bathrooms could also put schools in a bind on Title IX compliance. According to the federal government, a transgender girl who is told to use the boys’ locker room, or even a separate and private stall, instead of the girls’ facility, has a claim that the school is violating Title IX. A non-transgender girl who’s told she must share a locker room with boys may also have a claim that the school is violating Title IX. But would she not have a similar claim about having to share with students who identify as girls but are biologically male? Well, not if her discomfort and “emotional strain” should be disregarded. But this week, in a letter, dozens of members of Congress asked the Attorney General and the Secretary of Education to explain why they should be disregarded. The federal government is putting schools in a position where they may be sued whichever route they choose. (Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, declined to comment on this issue.)

A reasonable point, yes? The response of a transgender Slate writer was typical of this pseudo-debate. Excerpt:

To comply with the “surprising” guidance, Suk posits, schools are left with two options: Either allow transgender students access to restrooms and other single-sex facilities in accordance with gender (as Title IX requires) or abolish single-sex facilities altogether. Those two options are radically different. Yet, Suk assesses them both on the same terms—and in the process reveals that she, like the lawmakers who have since filed lawsuits challenging the guidance, believes them to be effectively the same. In her view, transgender girls “are biologically male.” That is an offensive and inaccurate notion, the kind of error one would hope not to find on the website of the New Yorker.

But transgender girls are not “biologically male.” To reiterate the idea that a transgender girl is, really, “male,” as Suk does repeatedly in her piece, is to reinforce the very anti-transgender rhetoric that has been carefully crafted by opponents of transgender people. Suk and others might believe that a person’s genitals define their “biological” sex, but that does not make it so. Continuing to put forth that narrative without challenging it as an ideological position, as opposed to a fact, is extremely harmful.

Though Suk does not bother to complicate what she means by “biological sex” by juxtaposing gender as belief with sex as biology, she plays right into the hands of those invested in undermining the authenticity of trans identity. This idea that our bodies and our “biology” could somehow betray who we “really are” drives not only the anti-trans conversation playing out in state legislatures and courts, but also the tragic violence targeting trans people—particularly trans women of color, whose existence is all too often seen not only as inauthentic but also criminal.

Who is that hatey-hater Jeannie Suk to claim that having a penis and male chromosomes make one a biological male? Haaaaaaaaaaate!

The hate is spreading, it appears. Maya Dillard Smith, an African-American woman who heads up the Georgia ACLU, resigned her position over the organization’s stance on transgender rights. From Atlanta’s NPR station:

Smith says she wasn’t well-versed in transgender issues and wanted to learn more. But, she says there was no room for dialogue at the ACLU.

“It’s through communication that we develop empathy and understanding, and I think that our democracy requires us to allow for exchange of ideas, without people being labeled one thing or another,” Smith says.

Lifesite News has more:

“I have shared my personal experience of having taken my elementary school age daughters into a women’s restroom when shortly after three transgender young adults, over six feet [tall] with deep voices, entered,” she wrote.

“My children were visibly frightened, concerned about their safety and left asking lots of questions for which I, like many parents, was ill-prepared to answer,” she continued.

In a statement, she said that the ACLU has become “a special interest organization that promotes not all, but certain progressive rights.”

The “hierarchy of rights” the ACLU chooses to defend or ignore, she wrote, is “based on who is funding the organization’s lobbying activities.” She did not elaborate on the group’s funding.

In case you miss the point, Dillard Smith is a progressive black woman with a Harvard Law degree. And she quit her prominent job allegedly because the ACLU will not allow dialogue about the issue within its ranks. Dillard Smith has started a website to promote honest talk about women’s concerns.

Here’s a powerful video the Alliance Defending Freedom produced, featuring the stories of female survivors of sexual abuse, speaking out against these new bathroom laws. Note the second woman in the series, a communications director for a local YMCA who was forced to resign because she objected to the new trans bathroom policy. This is madness on its face, madness compounded by the fact that nobody is allowed to question any of this without being accused of bigotry:

Real Leni Riefenstahl stuff, I imagine the LGBT lobby will say.

Did you notice Maya Dillard Smith’s comment that the ACLU’s priorities are being driven by its donors? I did. A source who works on religious liberty lobbying tells me that the LGBT lobby is incredibly well-funded. This is a David vs. Goliath situation. I’m sure she and I agree on exactly nothing politically, but I honor the courage of Maya Dillard Smith for being willing to be David in this situation, to protect women and children.

When the shaming, shunning, and censorship around the transgender issue is so bad that even a black female ACLU lawyer resigns in protest, you know a line has been crossed.