Category: Religious Liberty

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Yeshiva U. Sued By LGBTQ+ Student Organization

Today I’m on the religious liberty/persecution beat.

The New York County Supreme Court has ruled that Yeshiva University in Manhattan must allow a LGBTQ student club on campus. The court cited the school’s status as “a non-religious organization.”

Yep. Sure did.

However a brief look at their web-site says otherwise.

Yeshiva is a private Modern Orthodox Jewish University. But, according to this court, because Yeshiva is a “place or provider of public accommodation” it has violated the New York City Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations in the city.

It must allow student clubs, organization on campus even if those clubs and organizations have views, beliefs, or practices that are diametrically opposed to Orthodox Jewish teaching.

“Any ruling that Yeshiva is not religious is obviously wrong,” said Hanan Eisenman, a university spokesman, in a statement. “As our name indicates, Yeshiva University was founded to instill Torah values in its students while providing a stellar education, allowing them to live with religious conviction as noble citizens and committed Jews.”

The court’s decision, he said, “violates the religious liberty upon which this country was founded” and “permits courts to interfere in the internal affairs of religious schools, hospitals and other charitable organizations.” (While many non-Orthodox Jewish congregations are supportive of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, Orthodox leaders tend to interpret the Torah as promoting more traditional ideas of gender and sexuality.)

Plaintiffs (Club) seek an order restraining the defendants (School) from continuing their refusal to officially recognize the YU Pride Alliance as a student organization because of the members sexual orientation or gender and/or YU Pride Alliance's status, mission, and/or activities on behalf of LGBTQ students.  Plaintiffs further seek an order granting YU Pride Alliance "the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of Yeshiva University, because of the actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender of the YU Pride Alliance's members, and/or the YU Pride Alliance's status, mission and/or activities on behalf of LGBTQ students."  [emphasis added]

Source

Approximately 80% of its 6400 undergraduates live on campus. This ruling would allow members of YU Pride Alliance to live on campus with a status based on that member’s “perceived…gender.” Pride Alliance Members possessing anatomically ‘male members’ but who identify as female will be allowed to live in female dormitory space. Yeshiva would need to provide full and equal accommodations to any biologically male student who self-identifies as a female or woman.

Why? Judge Lynn Kotler asserted that Yeshiva’s educational purpose took precedence over its religious purpose. 

“Yeshiva is a university which provides educational instruction, first and foremost. Yeshiva’s religious character evidenced by required religious studies, observation of Orthodox Jewish law, students’ participation in religious services, etc. are all secondary to Yeshiva’s primary purpose,” Kotler ruled.

Source:  New York County Clerk 06/24/2022

The school’s Religious Liberty constitutional claims were denied. The school is appealing.

A senior at Yeshiva, Natan Ehrenreich, writing in a June 20 National Review piece disputed Judge Kotler’s primary/secondary purpose argument:

It is immediately apparent from the moment one steps foot on campus that YU is a 'religious corporation.'  Pictures of rabbis are plastered on every wall and elevator door.  Study halls are filled with eager men and women who spend many hours each day probing the depths of the Bible and Talmud.  Walk into any YU building at around 8:00am and you'll find at least ten men gathered together to pray, donning their tefillin (ritual phylacteries) as God commanded.  These men are religious.  Their institution is religious.

Similar “place or provider of public accommodation” laws are changing around the country with “perceived gender” or “gender identity” language being added to these statutes.

Religious Liberty claims will be tested.

Religious Schools, Hospitals, Charitable Organizations, Churches. etc., in certain jurisdictions had better get their legal team together. Claims based on religious autonomy, the Free Exercise Clause, the Free Speech Clause and the Assembly Clause of the U.S. Constitution will be adjudicated.

This case probably ends up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

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College Students Demand Protection From Words and Ideas

Thomas Jefferson once said:

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.  - Notes on the State of Virginia

Freedom of Religion was an uncomplicated matter. For Jefferson, tolerance of other worldviews would be wide ranging unless it damaged him financially or harmed him physically.

Andrew B. Myers / The Atlantic

The times have changed. In today’s world the psychologized self reigns supreme such that if what you do or say hurts another person’s feelings then you have harmed them. This amounts to a form of oppression. The offender must therefore be silenced. No pockets need be picked. Nor legs broken.

Words and Ideas are enough to cause harm. Identities are thereby marginalized. And legitimacy denied.

Tolerance is passé. Affirmation or silence is required.

Obviously, in such a fragile world, freedom of religion and freedom of speech will be under threat.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were featured in a previous post.

Coddling Generation Safety Blankey? Or Affirming Shared Truths?

Their very fine book, The Coddling of the American Mind offers insight into today’s fragile student psyche. And how we got to this point in our culture.

They wrote a series of articles in The Atlantic which they eventually turned into that book.

Here are some quotes:

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.  

Source: The Atlantic

According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided.

Lukianoff & Haidt

Read the whole thing.

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As a Christian I certainly advocate avoiding offensive speech, if at all possible, without denying my worldview.

As a grandparent I bemoan the overall lack of resilience and grit in today’s younger generation.

What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection?

Lukianoff & Haidt

We’ve coddled too far. The weakest person in the room now dictates the discussion. And remains woefully unprepared for life in this world.

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“Anti-Conversion Therapy” Laws

From the site SexMatters this letter writing campaign to UK members of government.

U.S. citizens should express concerns to their representatives too.

These so-called “anti-conversion therapy” laws massively overreach and disregard both free speech and religious liberties.

Here’s the letter they recommend UK citizen’s send to their representatives.

I was disappointed to see the photograph of you holding a placard that says “I support a trans-inclusive ban”.

This sounds like a clear slogan to get behind – but this is not a straightforward issue. I urge you to think again.

Affirming that a child is “trans” is not similar to sexual orientation. Childhood gender distress often resolves, and extreme treatments that involve social transition, cross-sex hormones and a pathway to surgery and sterilisation should never be routine.

I am sending you two reports that I hope you will read. One is by Dr Hilary Cass, former President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, on NHS gender identity services for children. The other is by Sex Matters, based on its research on the campaign to ban conversion therapy.

Dr Cass’s interim report sets out serious concerns about how children are being treated – not using normal clinical standards for exploring the causes of gender distress, but being declared as “trans” by their school and doctors after self-diagnosing. Her report highlights that a high proportion of those presenting at gender clinics are children and young people in care, with autism or experience of abuse, and those who would likely grow up to be lesbian or gay.

Threatening teachers, parents, foster carers, clinicians and youth workers with prison, fines and a criminal record if they disagree with a child’s self-diagnosis is not the way to get these children the support they need.

The call to “include trans in the ban” is presented as a simple moral test, but it obscures the complexity and uncertainty about the cause of so many children declaring themselves trans. Inclusion in a new criminal law will make it harder for children experiencing gender distress to get careful therapy, or to get support in school and in the community that does not simply “affirm” them as being “born in the wrong body” and needing a lifetime of hormone treatment and surgery.

I would like to meet to discuss this.

The Cass Review – an interim report to the National Health Service England.

Although not mentioned, Christian Pastoral Counseling will be effected by these proposed UK laws as well.

See this relevant post: Christian “Hate Crimes?“

And this one: Who Is The Conversion Therapist?

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As a Classic Christian I encourage everyone to “Embrace, Don’t Affirm.”

Individuals with a Gender Identity Disorder (Gender-Dysphoria) need Truth-filled Love. Please read this post for more details.

Love Refuses to Affirm Confusion