Civil Rights and Discrimination

Cautious on Coalitions

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The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has a proud history of fighting anti-Semitic hate, which is increasing in the U.S. (where it is embedded in parts of the so-called alt-right movement, and emerges as hostility toward Israel among parts of the left), in Europe (in large measure as a consequence of Islamic immigration) and worldwide.

Now, NPR reports, the ADL is trying to broaden its mission:

In subsequent years, mostly under the leadership of ADL President Abraham Foxman, the League was focused primarily on fighting anti-Semitism, but the League’s new president, Jonathan Greenblatt, wants the ADL to renew its old civil rights activism and move the work forward. …

There is just one complication. For many current civil rights activists, solidarity with Palestinians is taking precedence over the old solidarity with American Jews. …

And it’s not just the Black Lives Matter movement that is drawn to the Palestinian struggle. Earlier this year, a group of pro-Palestinian gay-rights activists disrupted a meeting in Chicago of the National LGBTQ Task force…. About 200 marched through the meeting site, shouting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, occupation has got to go!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

It’s good to reach out and build alliances, as long as you don’t subordinate your core mission to outside agendas. So I’m fine with ADL working with civil rights groups to combat hate and defamation, and hopeful that doing so might help address anti-Semitism among African-American progressives and campus social justice warriors, many of whom believe a tiny Jewish state, surrounded by large theocratic dictatorships that ethically cleansed their Jewish populations during and after World War II, is nevertheless uniquely evil among nations.

But if the ADL follows the ACLU down the road of becoming just another left-umbrella group, that would be a pity.

[No, not just me. Ira Glasser, ACLU executive director from 1978 to 2001, has lamented “the transformation of the ACLU from a civil liberties organization to a liberal bandwagon organization.” Most recently, it has defended using the state to force bakers to design wedding cakes celebrating same-sex marriage. What matters freedom of expression and religion when government-induced equality is on the agenda?]

More. George Will looks at “leftists eager to meld their radicalism with radical Islam,” and “to mend their threadbare socialism with something borrowed from National Socialism.”

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The Culture War’s Changing Tides

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Columnist Barton Swaim, writing in the Washington Post, asks: The left won the culture war. Will they be merciful?

Swaim takes note that a growing number of religious conservatives “are rethinking their role in American society and politics,” as they concede they’ve lost the fight to have the law and culture reflect their traditionalist views on marriage and sexuality. Increasingly, they now seek, in the words of Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “to live faithfully in a world in which we’re going to be a moral exception.”

Many religious social conservatives (albeit with some notable exceptions), writes Swaim:

are determined only to remain who they are and to live as amiably and productively as they can in a culture that doesn’t look like them and doesn’t belong to them. In time, this shift in outlook may bring about a more peaceable public sphere. But that will depend on others — especially the adherents of an ascendant social progressivism — declining to take full advantage of their newfound cultural dominance. I see few signs of that, but I am hopeful all the same.

I’m perhaps less hopeful, given the trope of the progressive LGBT left that social conservatives denied us freedom and liberty and so now it’s our turn to take away theirs (especially when doing so serves the progressive view that “equality” supersedes all other rights). It’s all sadly reminiscent of the many times throughout history when members of a persecuted class have gained cultural and political ascendancy, and then persecuted their former persecutors, often with a vengeance.

And yes, I’m talking about, among other indications of intolerance backed by state power, forcing religiously conservative independent service providers—at risk of paying exorbitant fines and/or being driven out of business—to create gay-messaged wedding cakes and to artfully plan, cater and photograph same-sex weddings.

More. From New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, The Liberal Blind Spot:

“In a column a few weeks ago, I offered ‘a confession of liberal intolerance,’ criticizing my fellow progressives for promoting all kinds of diversity on campuses — except ideological…. Almost every liberal [responding] agreed that I was dead wrong. ‘You don’t diversify with idiots,’ asserted the reader comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of them). Another: Conservatives ‘are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers.'”

(hat tip: Walter Olson)

More. Via a Wall Street Journal op-ed, ‘Freedom of Worship’ Isn’t Enough:

One Colorado, a gay-rights group…wanted to amend Colorado’s constitution to define religious freedom as “the ability to engage in religious practices in the privacy of a person’s home or in the privacy of a religious organization’s established place of worship.”

More. Via the New York Post, Evangelical Christians wonder where the hell their power went:

Politically, old guard religious right organizations such as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition are greatly diminished or gone, and no broadly unifying leader or organization has replaced them. In this year’s presidential race, the social policy issues championed by Christian conservatives are not central, even amid the furor over bathroom access for transgender people. …

“If a homosexual couple comes in and wants a cake, then that’s fine. I mean I’ll do it as long as I’m free to speak my truth to them,” said Slayden, taking a break after the lunchtime rush. “I don’t want to get (to) any point to where I have to say or accept that their belief is the truth.”

The problem, many religious conservatives say, is that government is growing more coercive in many areas bearing on their beliefs. They say some colleges — citing a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that required school groups to accept all comers — are revoking recognition for Christian student clubs because they require their leaders to hold certain beliefs. …

And this:

Trump uses rhetoric that has resonance for Christian conservatives who fear their teachings on marriage will soon be outlawed as hate speech. “We’re going to protect Christianity and I can say that,” Trump has said. “I don’t have to be politically correct.”

Progressives think they represent all that is, well, progressive, even as they go about working to deny liberty to others, and then defend themselves citing how conservatives worked to deny them their liberty—as if that then makes it ok to do unto others as they tried to do unto you.

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Why Obama’s Bathroom Decree Is Counter-Productive

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Peter H. Schuck, emeritus professor at the Yale Law School, on why Obama was wrong to impose a national rule on school bathrooms without public debate:

Do identity-based bathrooms meet this demanding [civil rights] test? The administration’s letter says yes. The subtext is that skeptics must be yahoos and bigots….

Here are just a few questions that people might have asked before making up their minds. How uncomfortable are people with the prospect of those with different anatomies sharing their bathrooms? Is this discomfort likely to grow or decline? Since gender identity cannot be confirmed before entering bathrooms, how great is the risk of voyeurism or other abuses? How costly will it be to provide gender-neutral bathrooms, and how would people of all genders feel about such alternatives?

And Schuck doesn’t even address the issue of public school locker rooms, where these questions are even more pertinent.

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‘Equality’ Supersedes All Other Rights, Right?

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Files these under signs of the times.

Say as we say, or else:

Greeting customers as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” — or even not using the pronoun “ze” or “zir” — could prove costly for New York City businesses under rules drafted by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s bureaucrats.

The Gotham mayor’s Commission on Human Rights says entities that fail to address customers by their preferred gender pronouns and titles are in violation of the law and could be subject to penalties of up to $250,000.

Law professor Eugene Volokh comments:

this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak.

I hope there aren’t any Quakers in NYC who still would like to refer to folks by “thee” and “thou.”

Our message on your (church) property:

Greg Bourke and Michael De Leon, who also were among the plaintiffs in the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court case creating a constitutional right to gay marriage, are accusing the Archdiocese of Louisville of discriminating against them for rejecting their headstone design celebrating gay marriage.

The two men bought a joint burial plot in St. Michael Cemetery, which is run by the Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Louisville.

They later submitted a design of a headstone for the plot, which featured an inscription of the couple’s wedding rings interlocking and an image of the Supreme Court building.

In a letter marked March 30, the Archdiocese denied the headstone design request, saying it goes against Catholic teaching on marriage. … The Archdiocese said other designs on the headstone, including “both your names and dates of birth and of course the religious symbol of the cross,” were acceptable. “However, we cannot approve the depiction of the Supreme Court building and the use of wedding rings.”

in another account:

Bourke said the Archdiocese is exempt from the local Fairness Ordinance that prohibits discrimination against members of the LGBT community, and the “Archdiocese has every legal right to do what they’re doing,” Bourke said. “We have no protection whatsoever in a situation like this.”

Which suggests he thinks they ought to have such “protection” to force the archidiocese to allow symbols and statements on church property that it finds at odds with the Catholic faith.

In both these stories, those pursing their objectives in the name of equality think what they want trumps the expressive, property and faith rights of others.

More. Via the Wall Street Journal’s Notable & Quotable, remarks by Cuban poet and human-rights activist Armando Valladares on receiving the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’s Canterbury Medal in New York, May 12:

Just as there is a short distance between the U.S. and Cuba, there is a very short distance between a democracy and a dictatorship where the government gets to decide what we believe and what we do. And sometimes this is not done at gunpoint but instead it is done one piece of paper at a time, one seemingly meaningless rule at a time, one silencing at a time. Beware young friends. Never compromise. Never allow the government—or anyone else—to tell you what you can or cannot believe or what you can and cannot say or what your conscience tells you to have to do.

His full remarks can be viewed here, or read here.

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ACLU Would Compel Therapists to Counsel LGBT People

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The ACLU condemns a Tennessee law that allows counselors and therapists to decline to provide their services to a client for “goals, outcomes, or behaviors that conflict with the sincerely held principles of the counselor or therapist,” as long as the professional recommends somebody else who can help the client.

Who would want a therapist that doesn’t want you as a client because you’re gay or transgender? Same people who want someone opposed to gay weddings to cater their gay wedding.

As Scott Shackford ‏blogged, “Tenn.’s Discriminatory Counseling Law Protects LGBT Folks from Getting Bad Advice.”

More. In a fundraising email, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) declares, “this week in Tennessee, Governor Bill Haslam signed a dangerous bill allowing medical professionals to refuse mental health services to LGBT patients.”

Gay rights advocates used to ask those who encouraged gays to stay in the closet and try to be straight, “Would you want your sister to marry a gay man?” I suggest asking Zeke Stokes, GLAAD’s vice president of programs, whose signature is on the email, “Would you want gay kids to be sent to an anti-gay shrink?” Who, of course, would be prohibited from indicating to potential clients that he or she is not accepting of homosexuality.

Furthermore. No, I don’t buy the argument that the law means suicide hotlines will let gay people kill themselves because the state isn’t compelling them to provide mental health services to LGBT people. Because, you know, Jim Crow.

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The Best Man

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John Kasich is hitting the right notes in calling for both religious conservatives and progressive LGBT activists (and their followers) to stop behaving like authoritarians, so of course both religious conservatives and progressive LGBT activists (and their followers) mock and condemn him—his advice would disrupt their mutual grievance games for fun, profit and power over others.

Via a Washington Blade report with the misleading headline (because he’s not addressing discrimination against employees), Kasich: LGBT people who face discrimination should ‘get over it’, discussing Kasich’s position on small business owners who don’t want to provide services to same-sex weddings:

Urging people to “calm down,” the governor said the country needs to protect religious liberty, but also can’t allow discrimination, so must “strike a balance” on the issue. “What I like to say is, just relax, if you don’t like what somebody is doing, pray for them,” Kasich said. “And if you feel as though somebody is doing something wrong against you, can you just for a second get over it because this thing will settle down?”

Kasich lamented the issue has “become a wedge issue that can be exploited by people on both sides,” saying the country should be the United States and not the “Divided States.”

He’s right, of course. But good luck with that position in today’s polarized politics.

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No One Is on the Moral High Ground Here

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The outing of the son of Mississippi’s GOP governor, after he signed a religious liberty bill, raises the usual issues. If the son of Gov. Phil Bryant wanted to make his sexual orientation public, he would have done so. His outing (assuming he is gay) is an attempt to embarrass the governor.

It’s at best a ham-fisted attempt to “educate” the benighted masses that gays are in all families. To the extent anyone pays attention, it will further polarize, with defenders of the Mississippi law seeing it as an exceedingly ugly tactic by opponents and thus feeling reinforced in their beliefs.

Personally, I believe it’s wrong for small business owners with religious convictions against same-sex marriage to be forced to provide expressive services to same-sex weddings (as they are in states and localities with LGBT anti-discrimination measures that apply to “public accommodations”). But the Mississippi law is in many respects “problematic” (as progressives like to label things they want to suppress) and quite probably unconstitutional. That’s because, among other reasons, it’s a mishmash of agenda items, including an unenforceable declaration that “marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman [and that] sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.”

The “religious liberty” battle now roiling through the states could have been avoided with a bit of common sense, such as an acceptance of religious exemptions in LGBT anti-discrimination matters. But progressive activists have made it clear they will tolerate no dissent on this.

I wish that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1993 with support from many Democrats who would now be required to strenuously oppose it, applied to states and localities. The law holds that legislation burdening the exercise of religion on behalf of a compelling government interest must be the least restrictive way in which to further the government interest. But in 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court held that RFRA could only be applied to federal legislation.

If that were not the case, it would have been interesting to see how RFRA might have played out in religious liberty disputes based on state and local anti-discrimination laws. (Subsequently, attempts to pass statewide RFRAs based on the federal model have been treated by opponents as the second coming of Jim Crow.)

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More Evidence: All About the “T”

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The news media is all over that Bruce Springsteen cancels North Carolina concert over ‘bathroom law’ (via CNN.com):

Springsteen and his E Street Band were slated to perform at the Greensboro Coliseum this Sunday. The roughly 15,000 ticketholders will all be eligible for a refund. The newly enacted law requires individuals to use bathrooms that correspond to the gender on their birth certificate, and has drawn fierce criticism for excluding legal protections from gay and transgender people.

The North Carolina law, as the article notes in a secondary fashion, invalidates a comprehensive LGBT anti-discrimination measures passed in Charlotte and prohibits any future local measures in the state. But the reporting and commentary is fixated on the bathroom issue.

Part of this is because transgender bathroom and locker room use has—along with forcing small businesses with religious objections to provide expressive services to same-sex marriages—become the dominant LGBT issue of the day. Employment discrimination, what’s that?

Along those lines, the Washington Post recently informed us that queasiness over using restrooms with the opposite sex is simply a matter of socialization and enculturation:

A bathroom bill wouldn’t be raised in some parts of Europe where restrooms are unisex. But the public bathroom here has regularly been a location of consternation for the puritanical, puri-panic-al United States: an American conundrum resulting from American sensibilities and American history.

Which is why so many suspect that gender-neutral bathrooms is the actual aim of progressive activists, and are responding with such vehemence.

Is this rightwing manipulation? Sure. But leftwing overreach has opened the door that reactionary politicians are now walking through.

P.S., I’ve traveled throughout Europe and don’t recall shared “unisex” (the author means mixed sex) restrooms, even in Scandinavia. But hey, if it serves the narrative.

More. Gay Washington Post columnist recounts:

I was having dinner with some LGBT colleagues when I excused myself and headed to the facilities — one labeled for men, the other for women, facing each other across a small hallway. Between them stood an employee, who looked me up and down and opened the men’s room door for me.

How polite? Hardly. Instead of thanking him, I explained how presumptuous he had been in deciding my bathroom preference for me. I tried in vain to explain how “gender identity” (the way individuals perceive themselves) is different from “biological sex” (generally indicated by a person’s genitalia, or sex assigned at birth).

Yes, for many progressives the aim is gender-neutral restrooms.

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Culture Wars Redux

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Via the Washington Times:

Mississippi bakers, florists and photographers who want to avoid serving gay weddings for religious reasons can breathe easy — at least for now.

Calls for a boycott and repeal campaign followed after Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed a religious-freedom bill Tuesday that protects small-business owners from facing penalties for declining to participate in same-sex ceremonies.

Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay advocacy group, called the bill “horrific” and lambasted Mr. Bryant while vowing that “his state will suffer.”

Since Mississippi has no LGBT anti-discrimination law, the religious liberty law was unnecessary; no one is forcing small businesses with religious objections to provide services to same-sex weddings.

But in a saner, less mendacious world, tolerance for religious conservatives — particularly as regards expressive services for same-sex weddings — wouldn’t be viewed as “horrific.”

The irony is that where religious liberty is a legitimate issue — in states and localities where LGBT anti-discrimination laws are used to punish and destroy small businesses that offend progressive sensibilities — religious freedom protections won’t be passed.

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All They Can See is the “T”

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Fortune notes that businesses responded with far more vigor to, and threatened boycotts over, Georgia’s narrowly scoped religious liberty bill than to North Carolina’s sweeping invalidation of current and future LGBT anti-discrimination provisions.

The reason: fear of being seen as supporting men in women’s bathrooms. The campaign against transgender rights is so effective it’s cutting gay rights off at the knees.

As I wrote in February, “It’s also likely that drawing a line in the sand around locker room use in public (including schools) and private facilities is going to sink future LGBT anti-discrimination efforts, which used to be focused on employment.”

More. But wait, we were assured this would never happen….College Decides To Make ALL Bathrooms Gender-Neutral:

Instead of being classified as “men’s,” “women’s,” or single-occupancy restrooms, all facilities at the Cooper Union will carry descriptive signs describing exactly what lies within. Former men’s rooms, for instance, are now described as “urinals and stalls,” while former women’s rooms now carry the label “stalls only.” Regardless of their type, all bathrooms will be open to whomever wants to use them.

We were told bathrooms going gender-neutral was just rightwing scare-mongering aimed at the rubes.

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