Rod Dreher's Blog, page 588

Gnostic Liberalism

Emmett Rensin, an editor at Vox, has written a tremendous piece criticizing what he calls “the smug style of American liberalism.” Rensin, 26, is a self-described socialist, and boy, does he do a number on American liberals for building an entire politics on looking down their nose at the right-wing rubes. Excerpts:

There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really —but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.

In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.

It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.

Yep. Five minutes ago, nearly everybody would have had difficulty accepting transgenders in bathrooms and locker rooms. Now if you don’t embrace it fully, you are a hater who deserves mockery and disdain. More:

Elites, real elites, might recognize one another by their superior knowledge. The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing.

Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you’re actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn’t know any better. Knowing all the jokes that signal this knowledge.

The studies, about Daily Show viewers and better-sized amygdalae, are knowing. It is the smug style’s first premise: a politics defined by a command of the Correct Facts and signaled by an allegiance to the Correct Culture. A politics that is just the politics of smart people in command of Good Facts. A politics that insists it has no ideology at all, only facts. No moral convictions, only charts, the kind that keep them from “imposing their morals” like the bad guys do.

Knowing is the shibboleth into the smug style’s culture, a cultural that celebrates hip commitments and valorizes hip taste, that loves nothing more than hate-reading anyone who doesn’t get them. A culture that has come to replace politics itself.

The knowing know that police reform, that abortion rights, that labor unions are important, but go no further: What is important, after all, is to signal that you know these things. What is important is to launch links and mockery at those who don’t. The Good Facts are enough: Anybody who fails to capitulate to them is part of the Problem, is terminally uncool. No persuasion, only retweets. Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to John Oliver for sick burns.

And:

If the smug style can be reduced to a single sentence, it’s, Why are they voting against their own self-interest? But no party these past decades has effectively represented the interests of these dispossessed. Only one has made a point of openly disdaining them too.

Abandoned and without any party willing to champion their interests, people cling to candidates who, at the very least, are willing to represent their moral convictions. The smug style resents them for it, and they resent the smug in turn.

The rubes noticed that liberal Democrats, distressed by the notion that Indiana would allow bakeries to practice open discrimination against LGBTQ couples, threatened boycotts against the state, mobilizing the considerable economic power that comes with an alliance of New York and Hollywood and Silicon Valley to punish retrograde Gov. Mike Pence, but had no such passion when the same governor of the same state joined 21others in refusing the Medicaid expansion. No doubt good liberals objected to that move too. But I’ve yet to see a boycott threat about it.

One more:

Make no mistake: I am not suggesting that liberals adopt a fuzzy, gentler version of their politics. I am not suggesting they compromise their issues for the sake of playing nice. What I am suggesting is that they consider how the issues they actually fight for have drifted away from their egalitarian intentions.

I am suggesting that they notice how hating and ridiculing the people they say they want to help has led them to stop helping those people, too.

I am suggesting that in the case of a Kim Davis, liberalism resist the impulse to go beyond the necessary legal fight and explicitly delight in punishing an old foe.

I am suggesting that they instead wonder what it might be like to have little left but one’s values; to wake up one day to find your whole moral order destroyed; to look around and see the representatives of a new order call you a stupid, hypocritical hick without bothering, even, to wonder how your corner of your poor state found itself so alienated from them in the first place. To work with people who do not share their values or their tastes, who do not live where they live or like what they like or know their Good Facts or their jokes.

Read the whole thing.  I find it impossible to say anything that can improve this essay. This is why people like me would be open to voting Democratic at times, but pull back, because we know that deep down, the people who run the Democratic Party hate us.

 

 

Culture & Desegregating Schools

The Atlantic has a piece about a new wave of desegregation efforts by local public school districts, trying to reverse de facto re-segregation. Excerpts:

[US Secretary of Education John] King is pushing cities and districts to make deliberate choices that yield better outcomes. Districts looking to integrate could, he posited, instead take two segregated elementary schools (say, one serving affluent white families and another serving low-income families of color) and instead create two integrated campuses, one for kindergarten through second grade, and another for the third through fifth grades.

King’s desire to “incentivize and accelerate” such deliberate attempts at integration might be laudable, but they’ve often been met with fierce opposition in places like Brooklyn and Charlotte, North Carolina. Pushback comes both from families at high-performing schools who are happy with the status quo, and from families at struggling neighborhood schools who want them improved instead of turned into a citywide series of magnet programs that might result in their kids trekking across town each morning. “We have not made as much progress on this front as we could have and should have in this country,” he said. And King is aware that housing policy will need to better align with education policy to make significant headway.

So, neither poor nor rich parents want this, though for different reasons, yet the government wants it to happen, and is willing to bus kids across town for the sake of social engineering? It’s like the Seventies never happened. And what does he mean by “housing policy will need to better align with education policy”? Building Section 8 housing in well-off neighborhoods? Seriously, what could this possibly mean other than that?

More:

Drawing on anecdotes from a recent visit to a Las Vegas magnet school, his own upbringing, and his experience as a father of children in Maryland public schools, [King] pointed out that all children benefit from diverse schools. Across the board, academic outcomes are higher, students learn empathy, and they are better prepared to succeed at college and in the workforce. In other words, demanding diverse schools doesn’t just sound nice, it has real benefits for everyone involved.

Can this be proven? I’m asking seriously. I’ve been through too much diversity training in the workplace, in which extravagant but groundless claims were made for the benefits of diversity, to buy this stuff uncritically.

The problem few education business professionals talk about in these conversations is the role of culture in educational success. It’s the factor that gets set aside in these deliberations. If you talk to teachers who teach in schools where most of the kids are poor, especially poor minorities, you will hear stories of radical communal dysfunction. A couple of weeks ago, I met an African-American who works at a Louisiana public school, who told me that the children of the poor at her school come from such dysfunctional homes that the school struggles to cope with them. “They think we’re their mamas,” she said. “It breaks your heart. They have no one else.”

Which yes, is heartbreaking. But looked at from an educational policy point of view, students who come from homes that are stable, and in which the parent or parents support the educational mission, are undoubtedly going to be at a disadvantage by having to share the classroom with a number of kids who, through no fault of their own, have none of those once-common factors in their lives. You could make a moral argument that being part of the same community means those who have more, in the sense that I mean, ought to be willing to share the same school with those who have much less. But let’s be honest about what we’re asking.

We have a good public school system in my parish, but I’ve talked to parents who have pulled their kids out of public schools in other parts of Louisiana because of discipline problems within the school. They either didn’t feel that their kids were safe, or they got tired of their kids’ education being disrupted by other kids who would not behave, and who took up so much of the teachers’ instructional time on basic discipline. If there is chaos in the individual student’s home and community, they will bring that into the school. I have friends — all of them idealists — who left teaching because they couldn’t deal with this kind of thing, nor with an educational bureaucracy that could not or would not bring itself to face reality.

There seems to be an unstated liberal premise in these discussions: that the only reason that middle class people want to avoid the poor in the public schools is because of racism or snobbery. Sure, that probably has something to do with it. But it seems to me more likely that what the middle class people want to avoid is putting their children into a situation in which a significant number of the students do not carry within their heads a culture amenable to learning — and that the culture these unfortunate kids do carry in their heads is going to make it much harder for their own children to get an education in a safe, stable environment. If I had to choose, I would much rather my kid go to a school in which she was a racial minority, but the ethos of the school was disciplined and geared towards real learning, than a school in which everybody looked like her, but there was no discipline and little concern for education among the students.

Again, you could make an argument from social solidarity and charity for engineering this kind of diversity. But that’s not the argument being made. Rather, the people advancing this position make the claim that diversity creates better outcomes for everybody. Really? Can we prove that? By what measure?

Besides, why can’t people have their neighborhood schools, as long as the funding is more or less equal? What’s wrong with that? Why should any parent, black, white, or brown, have to bus their kid halfway across the city to fit some social planner’s ideal? Haven’t we been down this road before? Are we really going to break up organic neighborhoods and settlement patterns to force them to fit the fantasies of social planners?

What we’re dealing with now, I think, is the loss of  a common culture, with a common set of expectations, and with a shared respect for authority. There’s no amount of abstract social engineering that’s going to get that back.

I could be wrong, and I welcome evidence to the contrary.

Firing Curt Schilling

You’ve heard about this, I guess:

ESPN announced Wednesday night it has fired outspoken baseball analyst and former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling after his reposting of a meme widely interpreted as anti-transgender on his Facebook page on Tuesday.

“Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated,” the network said in a statement.

The meme showed a picture of a male character wearing a wig and women’s clothing, with the caption, “Let him in! to the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow minded, judgmental, unloving, racist bigot who needs to die!!!”

Schilling is said to have added the comments, “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves” and “Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.”

Here’s the meme image he posted:

 

OK, that’s a provocative image, and Schilling was unwise to post it in this LGBT-McCarthyite environment. But is so bad it merits firing? Besides, I’m pretty sure that a rather huge number of people, especially ESPN viewers, share disgust with how if you aren’t on the Trans Bandwagon, you are basically a neo-Nazi. And honestly, is the commonly held opinion below now the sin that dare not speak its name?:

“A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.”

The reader who pointed me to the story said:

I mean, that guy (Schilling) seems like a d**k. But was it even that bad? A firing offense?

That’s what I don’t get. I wonder if he had not embraced that meme, if his political opinion would have been enough to get him fired.

I like this:

Someone should start a sports network that focuses on sports. I bet it would be HUGE.

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) April 21, 2016

Another reader writes:

The witch hunts will continue!

What I also found peculiar is the testimony from his son:

“And while I will say he’s not the most well informed in the modern LGBT+ culture, i can assure you he’s made great strides to understand people today. If he were a bigot he wouldn’t have allowed my Trans friends to stay over, he’s respected pronouns and name changes- never once have I heard him say something to me that I thought he should keep quiet about.”

So now trans is a totally common thing among children?  I thought this is supposed to be

Meanwhile, Britain is warning its LGBT citizens about traveling to Mississippi and North Carolina, which suddenly have become Mordor With Magnolias. The reader who tipped me off to that says:

They are going to get the entire world against the South over something everyone agreed on ten years ago.

This is called Progress. Sit still for long enough, and they’ll find a reason to smear you too.

View From Your Olive Tree

Photo by Marco Sermarini

The irrepressible Marco Sermarini took this shot today from the top of one of his family’s olive trees in the Marche. He was in his grove, trimming them. This has to be some of the most beautiful countryside on God’s green earth.

Marco says he met a Canadian woman at the monastery in Norcia the other day, a reader of this blog who knew about him and his wonderful community because of posts like this.

In other happy Norcia-related news, reader Jared K. went to a Birra Nursia tasting in California the other night, and met Father Benedict Nivakoff, who was there presenting the monastery’s beer:

#HateCake Hoax

LOVE WINS FAG. That’s not the cake I ordered, @WholeFoods and I am offended for myself & the entire #LGBT community pic.twitter.com/cuxuv6mL3G

— Jordan D Brown (@PasJordanBrown) April 18, 2016

When I first heard about the Austin HateCake™, with “LOVE WINS FAG” written on it in icing, I knew it had to be a hoax. The idea that a Whole Foods bakery anywhere would produce such a cake is risible. The idea that a Whole Foods in ultraliberal Austin, Texas, would do that sort of thing is beyond absurd. I’m glad that Whole Foods is countersuing the Rev. Jordan Brown, the gay pastor who has reaped a bountiful publicity harvest by claiming he was slurred by the HateCake™. According to the New York Daily News:

Whole Foods also pointed out the baker behind the cake was part of the “LGBTQ community,” adding that Brown’s lawsuit was “completely false and directly contradicts Whole Foods Market’s inclusive culture, which celebrates diversity.”

The barcode for the cake was also on top of the packaging during checkout, but later in Brown’s video, it’s shown to be on the side and bottom corners.

Brown, an openly gay founder of the Church of Open Doors, originally filed the lawsuit against the national food company for discrimination and asked for unspecified damages on Monday.

“Pastor Jordan spent the remainder of the day in tears. He was and is extremely upset,” the lawsuit said. “It is impossible to calculate the emotional distress these events have caused.”

If that were true, and an ugly word written in frosting on a cake causes incalculable emotional distress to this tender young evangelist, then Pastor Jordan probably shouldn’t be let out of the house unsupervised. But it is my opinion that this is not remotely true.

A GetReligion reader is way ahead of the media on this one. Check out Terry Mattingly’s post, which asks questions about whether Jordan Brown is actually an ordained pastor, and whether or not his church is a real thing. An inquisitive reader posted this comment:

I am not a journalist but I did do some checking on the Church of Open Doors. The “congregation” meets in the community room/area of an apartment complex. The official mailing address is a post office box at an establishment named “Drive Thru Postal”. On the “church” website, there is no mention of governance or oversight. According to Facebook link, the “church” utilizes MailChimp, I went to MailChimp and found the archive of emails for the “church” and the majority of them are pleas for money. This is the most recent:



“May starts a NEW chapter – We found a new permanent location to rent!

We can’t do this without your financial support! (The gospel is always free, but can be expensive to get out!)

One of our other goals is to take our services live via webcast to reach anyone seeking the gospel outside of Austin.

To support the outreach of your community, we depend solely on donations of any size!”

Hmmm. Whole Foods is going to own this guy by the time this is over.

Jordan Brown’s error was picking on a most unlikely target, and one with a pile of money to pay lawyers to fight back. If he had picked for his scam a small, independently owned bakery, particularly one run by Christians, he would still be a martyr.

Heartburn Over Jesus Lunch

There’s so much wrong with this story from Middleton, Wisconsin, that it’s hard to know where to begin.  Let’s start with the lede:

An ongoing debate over the propriety of a weekly Christian gathering dubbed “Jesus Lunch” at Middleton High School led to crowds of supporters and protesters facing off at a park shelter adjacent to the school Tuesday afternoon.

Around 500 students, parents and community members gathered at Fireman’s Park, where the lunch is held, to serve and eat lunch as well as express their thoughts on the controversy for about 10 reporters covering the event.

Jesus Lunch was started in 2014 by a small group of parents whose kids attend Middleton High School. The lunches involve parents passing out free food to students and having discussing about Christianity. According to students who attend Jesus Lunch, parents give faith-based motivational speeches and send positive messages their way. On one occasion, parents handed out Bibles and Christianity pamphlets.

Kids at this school have the right to go off campus for lunch. Some choose to go to this park. And on one day each week, moms serve food and have a religious gathering.

It seems to me that there’s a legitimate constitutional issue here. The park, adjacent to the school, is public property, but the school has some kind of lease with the city to use it during the day; under the terms of the lease, school rules apply. It is unclear to me if the public has access to the park during the day. If so, how can the school impose its rules on people who are not students? On the other hand, if someone were to get food poisoning at this event, would the school be legally responsible for it?

Second, it is not at all clear that the school has a right to restrict the use of the park by a religious student group. If the park is open to the use of other groups, then it has to be open to Christian groups. On the other hand, it is not clear if the distribution of religious tracts is constitutionally permissible on school grounds (which the park may or may not be).

So, I agree that there is probably a real issue here. But get a load of this:

Amanda Powers, a freshman at the UW-Madison and Middleton alumnus, showed up to protest the event. She said she is still close to many students at the school and the lunch is exclusive and divisive.

“I’m here to support my friends and peers that feel marginalized. There is a park right down the street that is public property that the parents could have rented out, but instead they chose to go against school laws and policies and stay here,” Powers said. “This is dividing the student body, hurting minority students and creating unsafe spaces for those that aren’t Christian.”

The perfect SJW mindset, right there. Why?

1. “Feeling marginalized” is sufficient cause to shut down someone else’s free speech;

2. “Dividing the student body” is sufficient cause to shut down someone else’s free speech, because conformity is what they desire, even though they use the term “diversity”;

3. “Hurting minority students” — in what way? Nobody is required to attend this thing. Which minorities? Are there no black, Hispanic, or Asian Christians in the school? This is SJW cant;

4. “Creating unsafe spaces” — this is the most Orwellian concept in the SJW ideology. Nobody can possibly believe that this Christian lunchtime pep rally makes the school unsafe for non-Christians. If it does, then let’s see the evidence. I am certain that Amanda Powers simply doesn’t like the people who do this, and considers is “unsafe” if someone, somewhere, has to be aware of people in their community that they don’t like.

Here’s hope:

Middleton student Anna Diamond disagreed with that sentiment.

“I’m Jewish and don’t feel like I’m being oppressed. People think the lunch is oppressive but it’s not; no one is forced to come here at all, students have a choice,” Diamond said. “The parents are not trying to get people to convert and they are very peaceful. We should all be allowed to have our beliefs and right to preach as long as it’s not offending or hurting anyone.”

Good for you, Anna Diamond, though it must be noted that a rabbi is quoted in the story saying that her son has complained that he has been “taunted” by students who go to the thing. If that is true, then punish those students for breaking the rules. If the event is constitutionally protected, why does the bad behavior of some Christian students mean the event shouldn’t happen at all.

Elsewhere in the story, protesters grumble that nobody would be happy with “Muslim Lunch” at the park. Well, maybe a lot of people wouldn’t, but so what? If the Muslims have a right to be there having lunch and talking about their faith, what’s the big deal? If they want to hold an Atheist Lunch, fine by me. It annoys me that the first response so many of us have to speech we don’t like is to try to shut it down, instead of first attempting to increase the diversity of speech.

But then there’s this from the story:

For some students, Jesus Lunch has filled the void of not being able to attend church. Brady Thomas, a senior, said his involvement in athletics interferes with church since many games are held on Sunday.

“The lunches have been really motivating and it gives me hope. It helps me regain my faith since I can’t go to church often,” Thomas said.

Oh, come on. If sports are more important to Brady Thomas than attending Sabbath services, then his faith is not very strong. Brady Thomas can go to church often; he simply chooses to prioritize athletics over God. It’s not the non-Christians and the anti-Christians who are forcing Brady Thomas to prefer sports to Jesus Christ.

Benedict At The APL

This year’s Academy of Philosophy and Letters conference will be on at theme near and dear to my heart: The Benedict Option: The Problems of Culture in Times of Crisis.

The APL has invited me — the only non-academic of the bunch! — to give the keynote address. There will be some great panels, including one on MacIntyre’s After Virtue, one on Russell Kirk and the “Mecosta Option,” one that will take up political theory and the Benedict Option, one that will consider whether or not the Ben Op can be scaled, and finally, one that will take up the question of whether or not now is the time to take the Benedict Option.

If you’re a fan of Front Porch Republic, you’ll be especially interested to learn that James Matthew Wilson, Mark T. Mitchell, and Jeffrey Polet will be on panels at the event. Claes Ryn, Bruce Frohnen, Winston Elliott III, David Walsh, on other will also be speaking. Here’s the full schedule.

Go here for more information about the conference, which will take place in suburban Baltimore on May 27-29. Nota bene, people who aren’t APL members can’t go without a member sponsor. But readers interested in attending the conference and in need of a member sponsor should contact either Justin Garrison, (garrison -at -roanoke -dot- edu), APL Secretary, or its President, Michael Federici, (mfederici -at – mercyhurst – dot – edu).

As far as I know, this is the first academic conference on the Benedict Option. Please come if you can!

 

The Senility Of The Western Mind

Political philosopher John Gray says that we are deceiving ourselves if we think that ISIS is a medieval throwback. Every barbaric act and strategy it employs have also been employed by modern states. In fact, an eschatological cult like ISIS could only have emerged in modernity; fundamentalism, he says, emerges and thrives in societies in which long-settled customs and traditions have been disrupted. And for that matter, movements like Communism and Nazism were simply secular versions of the same millenarian vision. More:

While much remains unknown, there is nothing mysterious in the rise of ISIS. It is baffling only for those who believe—despite everything that occurred in the twentieth century—that modernization and civilization are advancing hand in hand. In fact, now as in the past some of the most modern movements are among the most barbaric. But to admit this would mean surrendering the ruling political faith, a decayed form of liberalism without which Western leaders and opinion formers would be disoriented and lost. To accept that liberal societies may not be “on the right side of history” would leave their lives drained of significance, while a stoical response—which is ready to fight while being doubtful of ultimate victory—seems to be beyond their powers. With mounting bewilderment and desperation, they cling to the faith that the normal course of history has somehow been temporarily derailed.

More:

The prevailing mode of liberal thinking filters out any fact that might disturb its tranquility of mind. One such fact is that toppling despots does not of itself enhance freedom. If you are a woman, gay, a member of a religious minority, or someone who professes no religion, are you freer now in Iraq, Libya, or most of Syria than you were under the dictatorship of Saddam, Qaddafi, or Assad? Plainly, you are much less free. Another uncomfortable fact is that tyrants are often popular. According to today’s liberals, when large numbers of people flock to support tyranny it cannot be because they do not want to be free. They must be alienated from their true nature as human beings. Born liberals, human beings become anything else as a result of social conditioning. Only cultural and political repression stands in the way of liberal values becoming a universal way of life.

This strange metaphysical fancy lies behind the fashionable theory that when people leave advanced countries to join ISIS they do so because they have undergone a process of “radicalization.” But who radicalized the tens of millions of Europeans who flocked to Nazism and fascism in the interwar years? The disaster that ensued was not the result of clever propaganda, though that undoubtedly played a part. Interwar Europe demonstrates how quickly and easily civilized life can be disrupted and destroyed by the impact of war and economic crisis.

Civilization is not the endpoint of modern history, but a succession of interludes in recurring spasms of barbarism. The liberal civilization that has prevailed in some Western countries over the past few centuries emerged slowly and with difficulty against the background of a particular mix of traditions and institutions. Precarious wherever it has existed, it is a way of life that has no strong hold on humankind. For an older generation of liberal thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Isaiah Berlin, these were commonplaces. Today these truisms are forbidden truths, which can no longer be spoken or in many cases comprehended.

Read the whole thing. 

Future historians will marvel at how Westerners dismantled the fundamentals of civilization — religion, family, community — in the name of a utopian progressive vision: the liberation of the Self.

It is left to the rest of us to figure out how to remain resilient and hopeful amid the ruins they create with each passing day.

Learning Russian

No, I’m not learning Russian, not really. My two younger kids have been playing around with Duolingo (Lucas with Italian, because he wants to go to the Palio di Siena, and Nora with French, because Paris is the greatest city in the world). I started fooling around with it on my phone yesterday while waiting for Matthew to get out of math class, and decided to play around in Russian. I’ve been watching a lot of The Americans lately, and have been trying to pay close attention to the shape and tone of the language. Plus, hey, one day I might get to Petersburg to visit Evgeny Vodolazkin. It would be fun to know at least a few words and phrases.

Duolingo is a lot of fun, but it was challenging fun for me, with Russian. First there’s the Cyrillic alphabet. And then there’s the pronunciation. People tell me I have a very good French accent, and I know it must be true because when French speakers hear me say a few lines, they immediately assume that I’m far more fluent than I am (which is not very). I find that I don’t have much trouble picking up European accents, such that after a couple of days in country, I can read menus aloud to the waiter and make myself understood.

But Russian — wow, is it hard. Repeating these basic words and phrases aloud makes me sound like … well, like a clunky American. But I’m enjoying puzzling out the Cyrillic; if I can learn the Cyrillic alphabet, I will be able to sound out phonetically text I sometimes see at our Russian Orthodox parish.

I won’t ever get serious about learning Russian, because I simply don’t have the time. If I did have time to go all-in to learn a language, it would be French, because I have a good basis from which to start. And I would no doubt learn Italian before Russian, because Dante. Still, I would like to hear from students and speakers of Russian. What’s it like to learn that language? What are the particular difficulties that English speakers have with it? And what are the pleasures you who have learned (or are learning) Russian find in the language?

Me, sometimes I’ll pull my French psalter off the shelf and pray a few Psalms aloud en français, just because the language tastes like creamy butter in my mouth.

Federalizing The Trans Revolution

According to a federal court, it’s a violation of federal law to require high school students to use the restroom that corresponds to their biological sex:

A federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled on Tuesday in favor of a transgender student who was born female and wishes to use the boys’ restroom at his rural Virginia high school. It was the first time a federal appellate court has ruled that Title IX — the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination in schools — protects the rights of students to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity.

The ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in favor of the student, Gavin Grimm, comes amid escalating fights nationwide over transgender people and the bathrooms they should be allowed to use. …

Proponents of L.G.B.T. rights said the ruling could have “major implications” for North Carolina’s law, known as House Bill 2. North Carolina is one of five states covered by the Fourth Circuit.

“Today’s ruling makes plain that North Carolina’s House Bill 2 violates Title IX by discriminating against transgender students and forcing them to use the wrong restroom at school,” the A.C.L.U. and the gay rights group Lambda Legal said in a statement. “This mean-spirited law not only encourages discrimination and endangers transgender students – it puts at risk billions of dollars in federal funds that North Carolina receives for secondary and post-secondary schools.”

Eugene Volokh adds context:

In today’s G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit held that schools must let students use the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity and may not limit students to using the restroom that corresponds to their biological sex.

The court didn’t hold that this is required by the Constitution, but rather deferred to the Education Department’s interpretation of the department’s regulation on the subject. (The regulation, which interprets the federal Title IX provisions, and which generally forbids sex discrimination but allows sex-segregated restrooms, applies to any schools that get federal funds.) The court also held that the high school’s proposed accommodation of G.G., which would have allowed G.G. (as well as other students) to use three single-stall unisex restrooms that it created, was inadequate, because it still barred G.G. from using the ordinary multi-stall boys’ restrooms.

This is insane. This Gavin Grimm is biologically female, but because he/she insists that she is male, the federal government — both the Education Department and now a federal appeals court — have decided that the entire community must accept his/her view of herself, despite biology. And these are minors we’re talking about!

I suppose there might be some hope that because this wasn’t a constitutional ruling, a Republican administration could change the Title IX policy when it took office. Eventually, though, there’s going to be a constitutional challenge on this, and the federal courts are going to impose gender ideology on the rest of us. Do you doubt it?

David French points out that a new statement by the US Commission on Civil Rights represents an astonishing radicalization of civil rights laws, versus religious liberty — all over whether transgenders can use the toilet of their choice. More:

Since our nation’s founding, religious freedom has been deemed so vital to the health of our democracy that lawmakers and judges have often attempted to make sure that state actions are “narrowly tailored” when those actions conflict with religious freedom. Now the Left wants liberty to be narrowly tailored when it conflicts with the new nondiscrimination regime.

In the Commission’s eyes, there is no true accommodation of religion, because religion is merely an “excuse” for discrimination. Thus, there is no value in attempting to build a society where religious believers can live with integrity and — yes — “dignity” alongside sexual revolutionaries. But accommodation and mutual respect have never been the revolutionaries’ aim. Their goal is clear and explicit: to equate sincere religious objections to sexual immorality with the invidious discrimination of Jim Crow, and then to banish believers to the same margins of society currently occupied by white supremacists.

Indeed, Commission chairman Martin Castro says as much, comparing religious-freedom laws to efforts to “block racial integration,” which, of course, have “no place in our society.”

This is what you get if you vote Democratic for national office: the de facto criminalization of orthodox Christianity and common sense, when it interferes with LGBT ideology. Alas, one has learned not to expect much better from the GOP on this front, but at least for now, I think a Republican administration could be counted on to show at least somewhat more respect for the First Amendment, in particular its religious liberty guarantee.

This won’t hold, though. The handwriting is on the wall.

Take a look at this somewhat blasphemous clip from Saturday Night Live, making fun of Christian bakers and religious liberty claims. The reader who sent me this is a religious leader who has been involved with one of these cases. In his e-mail, he gave specific instances of the things that this parody depicts really happening in the case with which he was involved (I won’t mention any details here, because I don’t know if he would want to be identified). He adds:

This sad thing about this parody is that it insinuates that nothing so horrible is actually happening in our country, but it really is. Low-information viewers walk away from this with the smug impression that this religious liberty thing is much ado about nothing. It’s just stupid right wing Christians being stupid. That’s the effect of this kind of propaganda.

You know where this is going. What are you prepared to do about it?