Civil Commotion

Albert Mohler goes off on a hissy-fit about transgenders, Title IX, and the Constitution.

Now, when you hear the Title XI [sic] cited, you need to ask what is it. It goes back to 1972. Legislation that Congress adopted, and that the President of the United States signed into law, which modified the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It put in the issue of gender. It put in the fact that the federal government and the money that would follow the federal government must come with an understanding of no discrimination of the basis of sex. Now, let’s just state the obvious as we have had to state it before. There is no way with credibility or with the slightest amount of intellectual integrity to claim that either in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed, or that in 1972 when the education amendments, including Title XI, were adopted, that anyone involved in the process in any way thought that what would be described as LGBTQ would have been included. They are not included. They were not envisioned. They were not discussed. It was not a part of the national conversation. Period.

That’s true, but irrelevant. Properly put, the question is this: How do we implement the principal embraced by this legislation in light of what we know now but didn’t know then?

The abiding example is privacy, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution but everywhere implicit. This is why the Supreme Court may restrict the use of cell phone records by police, even though the Founders never heard of them.

Mohler knows that, too. What really offends him is that in this matter his childish, binary conception of gender has been disrupted (little boys have whatsits, and little girls do not). Human sexuality is a composite of many traits, however, some innate and some possibly plastic: plumbing, orientation, identity, others coming to light as research progresses. It’s no big deal, really — or, at least, it shouldn’t be. Unhappily, the stupid are like the poor: They’ll always be with us.

Apparently, The Donald’s 100s of pictures of James Comey and Robert Mueller hugging and kissing have mysteriously gone missing.

I occasionally wonder — not often, and never for long — “What’s it like to go through life being deceived by cheap grifters like Donald Trump? To actually live in the mad fever swamp he has constructed?” The fact in plain sight is that a lot of Americans are ignorant of even the rudiments of their own country’s history and ideals, and are brimming with incoherent malice. If they weren’t working such appalling harm to the country writ large, I suppose I’d feel sorry for them.

Illinois governor Bruce Rauner is running what is surely this sad season’s most tasteless campaign commercial.

At a stroke he triggers the Evangelical Right’s hatred of same-sex marriage and predicts a disaster if his opponent is elected, and not-too-subtly suggests an “unholy union” on the part of the opposition. I suppose there’s a sort of perverse genius evidenced by this advertisement, but it’s a genius turned to corrupt purposes and deserves to backfire.

BE CAREFUL! Don’t allow yourself to get caught-up in one of those sanctuary city riots sweeping across California!

Over the weekend at a campaign rally for Sen. Dean Heller (R) in Nevada, President Donald Trump said this:

“I don’t think we like sanctuary cities up here.

“By the way, a lot of people in California don’t want them, either. They’re rioting now. They want to get out of their sanctuary cities. You know, there’s a big turn being made, folks. A lot of these sanctuary cities you’ve been hearing about in California and other places, but California, they want to get out, they’re demanding they be released from sanctuary cities.”

Trump is not a man like Ronald Reagon, who often got his facts wrong: Trump makes-up stuff — an alternate reality exclusively for the dunderheads who can’t see that he’s nothing but a cheap demagogue. Really, if those idiots weren’t allowed to vote, too, it would be hysterical.

A South Carolina foster agency which receives federal funding is seeking permission to deny foster opportunities to non-Protestants.

The case centers around a South Carolina Christian organization, Miracle Hill Ministries, which claims that under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), they are not obligated to place children with non-Protestant Christian foster families.

Miracle Hill receives federal funds to pair children with foster families, while specifically recruiting Christian families. In practice, this means that they’ve frequently refused to place foster children with non-Protestant, non-Christian families. Several Jewish families, the Intercept’s Akela Lacy reports, have been explicitly told that they were rejected on the basis of their faith.

This request should not even require discussion; it ought to be rejected at once.

Imagine, analogously, that an agency operated by Muslims refused to place foster children with a family in which the women had driver’s licenses? Or a fundamentalist Baptist agency refused to place children in black families? Would anybody think such an agency should receive public money and be allowed to discriminate?

The agency in question receives public money — and should not be allowed to serve only members of their ridiculous club. If they are, it puts Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Atheists, gays, on and on, in the position of subsidizing discrimination against themselves. Unfortunately, Constitutional niceties are ignored in the age of Trump. The best we can hope for is that a conscientious public servant slow-walks the request until after the midterms, Trump is grievously humiliated, and the pros are at last free to do their jobs properly and ignore pious nutjobs.