Weekly Roundup
Symbolism Has Its Limits
For FAIR’s Substack, Laurie Miller Hornik writes about why it is important to see other people not as symbols, but as full human beings.
If a student asked me about symbolism in real life today, I’d have more to say. I’d say that people—actual people in the world—are not symbols. They are individual human beings with their own dignity and rights and should never be reduced to symbols.
As I write this, the hostages being held by Hamas are not symbols, even if the members of Hamas see them that way. The hostage posters we are all now familiar with, designed by Israeli artists Dede Bandaid and Nitzan Mintz, help remind people that each hostage is an individual person with full human dignity. When people tear them down, they might feel like they are tearing down a symbol of something—settler-colonialism, white supremacy, Jewish power—but they are not. They are tearing down pictures of specific individuals with full human dignity.
Championing Religious Freedom: ‘We Must Preserve Our Unity’ Going Beyond Political Disputes
The Religious Freedom Institute honored FAIR Advisor Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University with its 2023 Defender of Religious Freedom Award. The National Catholic Register published his remarks in full.
Our movement has always been one in which Christians, Jews, and Muslims, along with people of the great Eastern traditions of faith, are partners and, indeed, equal partners. We must preserve our unity. We will not agree on all matters of politics, including the politics of the Middle East, but our profound points of moral agreement — the points I just mentioned — must be the glue that binds us in solidarity with each other despite our points of disagreement. Where we differ, we must engage each other in a spirit of openness — willing thoughtfully to listen to each other and not simply to preach. However passionate we may be in our advocacy, we must cultivate and sustain a spirit of humility and eschew dogmatism. We must not doubt one another’s goodwill or question each other’s motives. The enemies of religious freedom would like nothing more than for political disputes to shatter our unity, thus undermining our work at home and abroad in upholding religious freedom for all. Let us see to it that their wishes are frustrated.
"There Will Be No Thanksgiving This Year"
For her Substack, BROADVIEW, FAIR Advisor Lisa Selin Davis writes about grandparental grief and the culture of rejection with the rise of gender ideology.
Support and affirmation are not synonymous.
Yet sometimes it feels—to these grandparents, to families, to those of us charting these cultural tides—as if the next step after coming out as trans is scanning for any reason to reject a family member, and the bar is lower every year. It’s some kind of gateway to authenticity: once rejected—even if you directed the rejection—you are officially oppressed, sufficiently discriminated against, and allowed access to the steaming pools of pain. I’m very familiar with this mindset: the waiting-to-find-who-will-hurt-me radar.
The FAP research began in an era when gay people would regularly be kicked out of their houses, their families, for coming out. Most of these families with LGBTQIA++ kids today wouldn’t shun them for being gay, but may hesitate to affirm, socially or medically, which is something else entirely. One gay friend of mine, whose husband was indeed rejected by his family for being gay, called this phenomenon a kind of cultural appropriation: They’ve never actually experienced this kind of rejection, but arranged to make it so.
Anti-Racism Dismantles Communities, Not Oppression
For The Black Sheep, a new Substack launched by Salomé Sibonex and Jake Klein, Reid Newton writes about her experience in the dance world after the death of George Floyd.
The worst part wasn’t how it made me feel, how out of place I felt in this world I had once thought of as an extension of home. The worst part was that the people in that room felt threatened by my being there. This seemed crazy to me, but it was undeniable. They genuinely felt unsafe and uncomfortable because of the color of my skin. They viewed me as an oppressor and a grifter looking to take—to appropriate—what wasn’t mine.
The world of dance, which had given me that precious language to communicate with anyone irrespective of who they were or where they came from, was fragmenting—consumed, like everything else, by our seemingly inescapable racialization and tribalization.
The award-winning choreographer who fell foul of the mob
For The Spectator, Rupert Christiansen writes about FAIR in the Arts Fellow Rosie Kay’s experience being cancelled and fighting back.
‘The arts are full of fear now, and I’ve become a sort of case worker for people in trouble because of their views. We need more protection, and we need more of us to stand up and say “No”, and we need arts organisations to think harder about what the principles of their mission are.’
What are those principles? ‘A former secret-service man told me that they were always interested in monitoring the arts because once they had clocked the obvious stance of the political activists, the artists were the free-thinkers, the trouble-makers, the subversives. And that’s what we’re meant to be, and that’s what a minority within the arts aren’t allowing us to be.’
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Important work, thank you. I wish there were some outlet for k-12 educators and health care workers who are caught in the culture wars. There's reams of reporting on higher ed, the arts and media, but many of us on these essential front lines have nowhere to turn. Our unions are captured by DEI propaganda while we are struggling to cope with understaffed and increasingly violent workplaces. Our voices have been silenced by the threats of mob cancelation and loss of livelihood. There are millions of us, and we vote.
What's the name of your organization? Oh, that's right: Foundation Against INTOLERANCE and Racism.
How do FAIR's leadership reconcile the demands that FAIR's principles place on the organization with its gushing endorsement of the so-called Religious Freedom Institute and the words of FAIR Advisor Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University?
FAIR set the tone when it chose to platform the National Catholic Register. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church has been a global center of intolerance towards gay people. Surely the champions of tolerance and pluralism at FAIR know that anti-gay bigotry has its roots in the Old Testament and that to this day most of the intolerance of "homosexuality" and gays is grounded (or justified) by religious faith.
Gay people alone bear the stigma of having their sexuality and intimate loving relationships (or, for that matter, their Grindr hookups) slandered in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
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Chastity and homosexuality
2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, 141 tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.'' 142 They are contrary to the natural law. 2333 They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. . . ."
https://www.usccb.org/sites/default/files/flipbooks/catechism/568/
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These concepts are not mere abstractions. They inform religious thinking to this day. For proof, we need look no further than the recent words of the lauded Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University. In Professor George's remarks on the occasion of receiving the award of "2023 Defender of Religious Freedom," he stated:
"And here at home, we stand up for the rights of the Evangelical Christian baker or wedding planner threatened with legal sanctions for honoring his or her conscientious belief in marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife . . ."
God forbid a person whose union with their life partner violates "natural law" and whose sexuality is "intrinsically disordered" and an "act of grave depravity" should be permitted to do business with a God-fearing Christian. Ordinarily the of phrase "God forbid" would be metaphorical, but increasingly it appears the defenders of religious freedom consider it their mission to impose their divinely ordained mores and beliefs on the rest of society in the form of law. Don't take my word for it. Earlier in his address Professor George articulated an extremist agenda that envisions a society in which the rights of others are curtailed so that religious people may live their faith untroubled by sinners:
"We insist on the right to shape and run our institutions — be they schools, hospitals, food pantries, shelters, adoption agencies, rehab centers, or what have you — in line with the tenets of our faiths, and we further insist on our right as free and equal citizens to engage in advocacy on terms of equality with our fellow citizens in the formal and informal forums of deliberative democracy."
One need not speculate what it means when religious operatives demand that they be permitted to operate "in line with the tenets" of their sectarian beliefs. We know from the most recent Supreme Court term that when religion wins, gay people lose. Who would have predicted decades ago that compelled-speech jurisprudence would provide the pretext for subjugating gay rights to religious freedom?
The scale of the ambitions Professor George proclaimed in his speech is breathtaking. His is not a church that fears it is on the verge of being crushed by a hostile society. No, to the contrary, the professor is describing nothing less than a form of Christian imperialism. Businesses and activities that are not intrinsically religious and are subject to antidiscrimination laws everywhere else in American society ("schools, hospitals, food pantries, shelters, adoption agencies, rehab centers, or what have you . . .") become church "institutions" - "our institutions" - that today have the legal right to discriminate against gay people.
This is not scaremongering. The Catholic Church can and does fire gay people from Catholic schools even when they serve in purely secular roles. Future restrictions on gay people's rights to to interact with "schools, hospitals, food pantries, shelters, adoption agencies, rehab centers, or what have you" are limited only by the imaginations of the faithful (or of far-right projects like the Alliance Defending Freedom) as to when and where a gay person's desire to do business with one of their institutions offends their religious tenets. Test cases are working their way through the courts as I write this.
I thought the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism was against intolerance. I no longer believe that. As the NRA does with the Second Amendment's right to bear arms, FAIR takes a maximalist view of the First Amendment's religious freedom clause. Balancing tests, it seems, are for gymnasts, not jurists.
I call upon FAIR to explain itself. In secular terms, and without resorting to the reasoning of the notorious 303 case (303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 600 U.S. 570 (2023)), why are religious beliefs that curtail gay people's right to do business with businesses in a secular society not also a clear expression of the type of intolerance that FAIR purports to oppose? Why must I be expected to tolerate an Evangelical's intolerance?
Still, it is true that every pitch-black cloud has a sliver lining. Among the many arguments against gender identity ideology, quite a few of which have merit, is the charge that the trans identity is not an ancient manifestation of humankind's variability but a recent sociocultural phenomenon that has more in common with fads than in human constants such as sex and race. Well, that's one thing we gay people don't have to worry about, and we have it on no less of an authority than the Roman Catholic Church: "[Homosexuality] has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures." Thank you, Leviticus, for sealing our claim to be part of the human family.