RUTHFULLY YOURS

From the official Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination’s Gender Identity Guidance, just released last week:

Even a church could be seen as a place of public accommodation if it holds a secular event, such as a spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public.

Now, churches hold events “open to the general public” all the time — it’s often how they seek new converts. And even church “secular events,” which I take it means events that don’t involve overt worship, are generally viewed by the church as part of its ministry, and certainly as a means of the church modeling what it believes to be religiously sound behavior.

My guess is that most churches would not turn someone away from a generally open spaghetti supper. (Though I think churches should be free to exclude transgender attendees — just as they should be free to hold men-only and women-only events or, for that matter, black-only events, white-only events, events only for ethnic Jews, and the like — that is a question for another day.)

But some religious leaders, as well as the church employees and volunteers, may refuse to use pronouns that they believe are inconsistent with God’s plan as revealed by anatomy. To quote one example — whether or not you agree with its logic or theology —

Truth-telling is always necessary for the Christian (Eph. 4:15). We are not allowed speak in ways that are fundamentally dishonest and that undermine the truth of God’s word about how he made us and the world. Transgender ideology is fundamentally a revolt against God’s truth. It encourages people–sometimes very disturbed and hurting people–to deny who God made them to be. It traps them in a way of thinking and living that is harmful to them and that alienates them from God’s truth. We do not serve them or love them well by speaking as if transgender fictions are true. …

The practical upshot of this principle means that I must never encourage or accomodate transgender fictions with my words. In fact, I have an obligation to expose them. For me, that means that I may never refer to a biological male with pronouns that encourage him to think of himself as a female. Likewise, I may never refer to a biological female with pronouns that encourage her to think of herself as a male. In other words, I have to speak truthfully. And that includes the choice of pronouns that I use.

Under Massachusetts law, refusing to use a transgender person’s preferred pronoun would be punishable discrimination. (At least this is true of “he” or “she” — I saw nothing in the document about “ze” and other newly made-up pronouns.) The Massachusetts document I linked to makes that clear in the employment context, and it also makes clear that the antidiscrimination law rules apply to places of public accommodations (including churches, in “secular events” “open to the public”) just as much as to employment.

Indeed, a church might be liable even for statements by its congregants (and not just its volunteers, who are acting as agents) that are critical of transgender people. Tolerating such remarks is generally seen as allowing a “hostile environment,” and therefore “harassment.” Indeed, the statement I linked to specifically encourages people to “prohibit derogatory comments or jokes about transgender persons from employees, clients, vendors and any others, and promptly investigate and discipline persons who engage in discriminatory conduct” (emphasis added). But that’s not just encouragement; it simply reflects hostile work environment harassment law, which has long required employers to restrict derogatory speech by clients, to prevent “hostile environments.” See 29 C.F.R. § 1604.11. The same logic applies for places of public accommodation, which Massachusetts says can include churches.

Pro-Israel bloggers like William Jacobson and Caroline Glick have brought much attention to a fiasco at Syracuse University first reported by The Atlantic. The invitation to Shimon Dotan, a leftist Israeli filmmaker, to speak on and show his anti-settler movie “The Settlers” at a Syracuse conference on religion and film, was revoked because of the fear of pressure from campus activists supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. While Jacobson and Glick wrote mordant commentaries, pointing to the alarming advance of antisemitism on campus, and The Atlantic stressed the role of political correctness, to me the most interesting character in this story is M. Gail Hamner, the tenured professor who disinvited Dotan. Here are extracts of her letter of disinvitation, taken from Jacobson’s blog, with his emphases. The letter is a classic example of shame-filled shamefulness:

I now am embarrassed to share that my SU colleagues, on hearing about my attempt to secure your presentation, have warned me that the BDS faction on campus will make matters very unpleasant for you and for me if you come. In particular my film colleague in English who granted me affiliated faculty in the film and screen studies program and who supported my proposal to the Humanities Council for this conference told me point blank that if I have not myself seen your film and cannot myself vouch for it to the Council, I will lose credibility with a number of film and Women/Gender studies colleagues. Sadly, I have not had the chance to see your film and can only vouch for it through my friend and through published reviews. Clearly I am politically naive. I also feel tremendous shame in reneging on a half-offered invitation….. I feel caught in an ideological matrix and by my own egoic needs to sustain certain institutional affiliations.

After this came out, as the Algemeiner reported, Syracuse University overruled her and promised, in a high-minded statement of its principles, to re-invite Professor Dotan. In itself that was good news, even if, as Jacobson emphasized, it averted its administrative eye from the dirty work that had put those pressures on Professor Hamner in the first place. Professor Hamner then issued another shamefaced apology in which she describes herself as “overly concerned” about “how others would react,” and apologizes for not having viewed the film in advance. Note, however, that confessing to the crime of not seeing the movie in advance amounts to the admission that if only everyone had known it was an anti-settler movie maybe it would have been okay. (Apparently not though, if Syracuse Professor Miriam Elman, the subject of the Algemeiner interview, is to be believed.)

Ms. Mac Donald is the author of “The War on Cops” (Encounter, 2016) and a contributing editor of City Journal, from whose fall issue this article is adapted.

‘The streets are gone,” Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago police union, told me last month. The night before, Aug. 14, a Chicago police officer’s son had been killed in a shooting while sitting on his family’s porch, one of 92 people killed in Chicago during the worst month for homicides in the Windy City since July 1993. The August victims who survived included 10-year-old Tavon Tanner, shot while playing in front of his house (the bullet ripped through Tavon’s pancreas, intestines, kidney and spleen); an 8-year-old girl shot in the arm while crossing the street; and two 6-year-old girls.

On Sept. 6, a 71-year-old man was accosted by a teen on a bike while watering his lawn. The robber demanded the man’s wallet and when he refused shot him in the abdomen, then grabbed his wallet before pedaling away.

By Sept. 8, nearly 3,000 people had been shot in Chicago in 2016, an average of one shooting victim every two hours. Five hundred and sixteen people had been murdered. Gun homicides and non-fatal shootings were up 47% over the same period of 2015, which had seen a significant rise in crime over 2014.

“There is no way out of this shooting spree,” Mr. Angelo said. His despair is understandable, because Chicago is the country’s most-glaring example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Chicago officers have cut back drastically on proactive policing under the onslaught of criticism from the Black Lives Matter movement and its political and media enablers.

In October 2015, Mayor Rahm Emanuel told U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch during a crime meeting in Washington, D.C., that the Chicago police had gone “fetal,” and were less likely to interdict criminal behavior. That pull-back worsened in 2016, with pedestrian stops dropping 82% from January through July 20, 2016, compared with the same period in 2015, according to the Chicago police department. The cops are just “driving by people on the corners,” Mr. Angelo says, rather than checking out known drug dealers and others who raise suspicions. Criminals are back in control and black lives are being lost at a rate not seen for two decades.