IGF CultureWatch

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

North Carolina’s legislature voted, with GOP unanimity, to void all local LGBT anti-discrimination measures within the state. As NPR.org reports:

One word dominated the debate over the bill and the Charlotte ordinance before it: “bathroom.” Charlotte already protected residents from discrimination based on race, age, religion and gender. On Feb. 22, the city council voted to expand those protections to apply to sexual orientation and gender identity, too.

The most controversial element of Charlotte’s expanded ordinance was the fact that it would allow trans people to use the bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity.

One-party state supporters will point to this, and a less onerous religious-liberty exemption bill for faith-based groups in Georgia, as indicating why LGBT voters and their allies should only support Republicans. I disagree, as noted in my last post. If there had been at least one, or preferably a few, LGBT-supportive Republicans in the GOP caucus, the outcome might have been different. At least the Republicans couldn’t have so easily painted the issue as a purely partisan one.

The GOP is going to have power—nationally, statewide and locally—from time to time, so the view that it should simply be opposed and not reformed doesn’t move me. And reform means supporting those Republicans who are with us.

One the broader issue, again we see the effective use of fear over transgender people and bathrooms. The left has never understood why the apparent threat to unisex bathrooms, locker rooms and showers has such power, and that’s why we keep losing. The battles for lesbian and gay rights took a few decades of education and engagement; this has not happened around transgender issues, and I include in this failure the farce of sensationalism around Caitlan Jenner. And so transgender rights become the battering ram to obliterate gay rights.

Finally, I think the North Carolina and Georgia bills are radically different. I support faith-based exemptions for religious groups (I’d even go further and support a right of religious dissent for private businesses that don’t want to provide expressive services for same-sex weddings). If LGBT activists weren’t going to the mat to oppose religious exemptions, such a compromise might be able to deter a nuclear option such as the one unleashed in North Carolina.

More. Gov. Nathan Deal vetos the Georgia law, which focused exclusively on religious freedom and was very different from what North Carolina passed, but was treated by the liberal media and LGBT activists as if it were the exact same thing.

I have no issues with the Georgia law per se, although the governor was also correct in noting that the bill’s supporters failed to provide examples in Georgia of the kind of discrimination against faith-based organizations and “certain providers of services” that the bill seeks to protect against (which, unstated, is due to the fact that Georgia lacks an LGBT anti-discrimination law).

Furthermore. As the Washington Post reports, it’s big business lobbying against religious conservatives on these measures. Progressives typically condemn business lobbying as the root of all evil but welcome it in this particular case.