Rays of light are still possible, even as late in the day as it is. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals says a university professor has the right to refer to a he as a he:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled Friday in favor of Dr. Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University, reversing a district court’s dismissal of his lawsuit against university officials. The university punished Meriwether because he declined a male student’s demand to be referred to as a woman, with feminine titles and pronouns. The court ruled that, based on the allegations in the complaint, the university violated Meriwether’s First Amendment rights.
“This case forced us to defend what used to be a common belief—that nobody should be forced to contradict their core beliefs just to keep their job,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch. “We are very pleased that the 6th Circuit affirmed the constitutional right of public university professors to speak and lead discussions, even on hotly contested issues. The freedoms of speech and religion must be vigorously protected if universities are to remain places where ideas can be debated and learning can take place.”
“Traditionally, American universities have been beacons of intellectual diversity and academic freedom,” the 6th Circuit wrote in its opinion in Meriwether v. The Trustees of Shawnee State University. “They have prided themselves on being forums where controversial ideas are discussed and debated. And they have tried not to stifle debate by picking sides. But Shawnee State chose a different route: It punished a professor for his speech on a hotly contested issue. And it did so despite the constitutional protections afforded by the First Amendment. The district court dismissed the professor’s free-speech and free-exercise claims. We see things differently and reverse.”
In January 2018, during a political philosophy class, Meriwether responded to a male student’s question by saying, “Yes, sir.” After the class, the student approached Meriwether, stated that he was transgender, and demanded that the professor refer to him as a woman, with feminine titles and pronouns. When Meriwether did not instantly agree, the student became belligerent and promised to get Meriwether fired.
The student then filed a complaint with the university, which launched a formal investigation. Meriwether offered to call the student by first or last name, but the student insisted that Meriwether use pronouns and titles consistent with the student’s gender identity. University officials ultimately rejected any compromise that would allow Meriwether to speak according to his conscience and sincerely held religious beliefs. Instead, they formally charged him, saying “he effectively created a hostile environment” for the student simply by declining to use the feminine pronouns demanded by the student. Later, they placed a written warning in his personnel file and threatened “further corrective actions” unless he articulates the university’s ideological message.
The 6th Circuit explained that if “professors lacked free-speech protections when teaching, a university would wield alarming power to compel ideological conformity. A university president could require a pacifist to declare that war is just, a civil rights icon to condemn the Freedom Riders, a believer to deny the existence of God, or a Soviet émigré to address his students as ‘comrades.’ That cannot be.”
On the other hand, according to Bruce Bawer at City Journal, things are not working out so well for Rob Hoogland:
At this moment, a Vancouver postman named Rob Hoogland is sitting in a jail cell in British Columbia. He will be there until at least April 12, when he’s scheduled for a court date. At that time, he may be ordered to remain behind bars for a period yet to be determined.
Has Hoogland killed or robbed somebody? Is he an arsonist? A rapist? No. What did he do, then? Short answer: he tried to save his emotionally unstable daughter from self-destruction.
The long answer begins in the 2015–16 school year, when, as Hoogland recounted in a talk last October, his then fifth-grade daughter (he also has an older son) was getting into trouble at school and Hoogland and his estranged wife (whom he divorced in the spring of 2015) decided it might be good for her to see her school counselor. Since it’s forbidden by the British Columbia Supreme Court to make her name public, she’s referred to in legal documents as “A.B.” (Hoogland is “C.D.,” and the girl’s mother is “E.F.”)
Unknown to Hoogland, A.B. continued to see school counselors well into seventh grade, when one day she suddenly cut her hair very short. At the end of that school year, Hoogland saw that she was listed in her yearbook under a male name. It turned out that the school had been feeding her transgender ideology, and that she’d already begun “socially transitioning” to a male identity under the direction of a psychologist, Wallace Wong, who was encouraging her “to take testosterone.” To this end, Wong referred her to an endocrinologist at the Gender Clinic and Children’s Hospital in Vancouver.
It used to be understood that gender dysphoria is vanishingly rare, typically afflicts boys, and almost always begins to manifest when a child is extremely young. In recent years, however, there’s been an epidemic in many Western countries of older girls who suddenly claim to be in the wrong body. This “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” as Abigail Shrier argues in her important 2020 bookIrreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (which I reviewed), is a fad rooted in a number of contemporary social factors.
Hoogland was drawn ever deeper into a negation of his parental rights:
By eighth grade, her school was making special bathroom arrangements for her and requiring that she be addressed by her new name. Early in that school year, she was taken to see the province’s “top transgender psychologist expert,” known in court documents as “I.J.” When Hoogland first met I.J. a month or two later, he asked him to treat A.B. for depression. Instead, I.J. pronounced that A.B. was a “prime candidate for cross-sex hormones,” which, he promised, would “solve all her problems.” Accordingly, he referred her to the gender clinic at British Columbia Children’s Hospital, where, after a single hour’s examination, an endocrinologist decided to put her on puberty blockers and testosterone.
At the beginning of ninth grade, A.B. had her first appointment with G.H., an endocrinologist at British Columbia Children’s Hospital, to receive testosterone injections. But when E.F., the mother, contacted Hoogland during the appointment to ask for his consent, he withheld it. Four months later, in December 2018—by which time A.B. had turned 14—G.H. told Hoogland that her treatment would go forward, that Hoogland had no say in the matter, and that he’d no longer have access to her medical records. In defense of this decision, G.H. cited a 1993 amendment to the British Columbia Infants Act—which permits doctors to prescribe birth control for, and perform abortions on, young people whom those doctors judge to be “mature minors,” and to do so without parental knowledge or consent. Now, this amendment was being used to allow the medical treatment of gender dysphoria in “mature minors,” also without parental consent.
Shortly after hearing from G.H., Hoogland took the matter to provincial court, where A.B.’s treatment was suspended twice. In February 2019, the case went to the supreme court of British Columbia. Among the respondents to Hoogland’s petition were E.F., I.J., and G.H., plus the British Columbia Children’s Hospital, the provincial ministry of education, the local school district, and a half-dozen counselors and officials at both the elementary and high-school levels.
The case filing stated that A.B. had “gender identified as a male” since age 11 and had “informed his school counsellor of that when he was 12 years old and in Grade 7”—information withheld from Hoogland at the time. The same document cited A.B.’s suicide attempt, linking it not to a romantic rebuff but to gender dysphoria and stating that, in G.H.’s view, a “continued delay in treatment” would risk another suicide attempt. Affidavits by international experts brave enough to oppose the administration of testosterone to teenage girls were summarily dismissed.
Instead of recognizing that very few, if any, 14-year-olds are in a position to understand the grave implications of sex-change therapy, the judge, Gregory Bowden, ruled that A.B. was a “mature minor” and that her consent, by itself, was thus “sufficient for the treatment to proceed.” And instead of being guided by caution—which would have been wise, one should think, in a case involving such radical measures—Bowden bought fully into the trans-activist line that a further delay in A.B.’s treatment would be injurious to her. It’s also significant that Bowden denied Hoogland’s lawyer a relatively routine 40-day adjournment to prepare.
That wasn’t all. Bowden placed remarkable restrictions on Hoogland. He was forbidden to try to persuade A.B. to stop treatment. He was forbidden to address her by her birth name. He was forbidden, in any conversation with anyone, to refer to her as a girl or to use female pronouns to describe her. If he were to do any of these things, ordered Bowden, it would be “considered to be family violence”—yes, violence—under the Family Law Act. That’s par for the course today, when certain words are viewed as acts of violence, while objective acts of violence—such as the use of chemicals to permanently alter developing bodies, and the use of scalpels to remove healthy organs—are regarded as purely benign.
Soon after Bowden’s ruling, A.B. began gender-transition treatment, but Hoogland persevered with his legal fight. In violation of Bowden’s order, he also spoke in public and gave interviews about the case. In April 2019, in response to an application by A.B., Judge Francesca Marzari tried to quell these public appearances. Noting that there had been “substantial online commentary [i.e., reader comments on articles about the case] analogizing A.B.’s medical treatment to child abuse, perversion and even pedophilia,” and that A.B.’s doctors had allegedly received threatening emails, Marzari ordered Hoogland to stop trying to talk A.B. out of receiving treatment for gender dysphoria and to stop communicating with others—including media outlets, and A.B. herself, but excluding his lawyers, the court, doctors, and other authorized persons—about A.B.’s decision to receive hormone therapy.
Instead of recognizing that Hoogland was acting out of concern for his child, Marzari painted him as a selfish bigot. His conduct, she wrote, was causing A.B. “a significant risk of harm.” He was “publicly rejecting his [A.B.’s] identity, perpetuating stories that reject his identity, and exposing him to degrading and violent commentary in social media.” Marzari adduced no evidence to support any of these assertions. That said, Hoogland, added Marzari, “has been irresponsible in the manner of expressing his disagreement [with A.B.’s decision] and the degree of publicity which he has fostered with respect to this disagreement with his child.” Marzari also seconded Bowden’s description of Hoogland’s “rejection of A.B.’s gender identity” as “family violence.”
Mike Gonzales of the Heritage Foundation, writing at Law & Liberty, reviews the book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital by Stephen R. Soukup. A lot of corporate acquiescence to lefty do-gooderism can be traced to the introduction of the "stakeholder capitalism" model:
American business was about to change, as the new love for the scientific method turned into the pursuit of “scientific” planning for businesses, including a new player, the “stakeholder”—the employees, the consumers, and the residents who may live near a plant—whose interests supposedly diverge from those of the “shareholder.” The eager supporters of stakeholder activism gave the idea a superior moral force—the narrative that what mattered was making profits was supplanted with the theory that stakeholders were ends in themselves. The stakeholder became superior to the shareholder and subject to the “planners” actions. And the superiority was not simply moral, but also in terms of the bottom line. Soukup quotes professors Thomas Donaldson and Lee Preston as writing in 1995 on the evolution of the stakeholder model that “whatever their methodologies, these studies have tended to generate ‘implications’ suggesting that adherence to stakeholder principles and practices achieves conventional corporate performance objectives as well or better than rival approaches.” Stakeholder analysis became, Soukup tells us, “a key concept in corporate strategic analysis and planning.”
The problem here, writes Soukup, is an old one: these planning theorists “applied purely systemic, scientific methods to phenomena that were not easily shoehorned into a scientific method,” i.e., human affairs. In one of the book’s best lines, Soukup writes that “the little human animal has a mind of his own and defies behaving in ways that fit the statistical model.”
The supporters of stakeholder theory—and also of the obviously false idea that the interests of the stakeholder and the shareholder always diverge—needed a foil, and Soukup makes a good case that they set up a strawman opponent in the ideas of Milton Friedman, especially a 1970 essay he wrote for The New York Times Magazine.
In the essay, the monetarist economist, who would win a Nobel Prize six years later, explained that the corporate “manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation” and that his responsibility was to “conduct the business in accordance to their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible.” This somehow was traduced later as a “cult of shareholder value” which, to critics, meant short-termism and ignoring the interests of “stakeholders,” things Friedman didn’t say and wouldn’t have said because they’re nonsensical. “None of this matters,” writes Soukup. “The only thing that matters is the myth of Friedman, the myth of the greedy shareholder and the rapacious capitalists, the myth that shareholders and stakeholders must, always and everywhere, be opposed to one another.”
At First Things, Scott Walter takes a deep-dive look at Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the founders of Black Lives Matter.
Tevi Troy's essay at National Affairs, "How To Defend Free Speech," is a worthwhile contribution on that subject, but he may be a little too optimistic about the success of the endeavor. Says it depends on a "unified conservative movement." Good luck with that.
Ed West, writing at UnHerd, in an essay entitled "The Tyranny of Diversity Training," says that that toxic trend is now permeating Britain.
This Harvard Business Review article entitled "Why Diversity Programs Fail" is from 2016, but is a timely accompaniment to the essay above.
Yet another sign of how late in the day it is in post-America: A Gallup poll shows US church membership falling below a majority for the first time ever.
LITD has looked at the trend within the Republican Party to cultivate some kind of working-class orientation, building on the populism that Trumpism was based on. Marco Rubio's recent pronouncements. The Jim Banks memo. But Andrew Trunsky at The Daily Caller says that Illinois Republican Rep. Peter Meijer has a different approach that might appeal to the populists:
He even introduced his Direct Dollars Over Government Expenses ($DOGE) plan, which would have given $2,400 checks to qualifying Americans instead of the $1,400 outlined in the American Rescue Plan. His bill, however, was nearly $1 trillion smaller than the ARP, which President Joe Biden signed into law on Mar. 11.
After all, it has simplicity going for it, and pro-freedom types greatly admire the elegant simplicity of freedom-oriented policy:
“Direct cash payments have long been part of the conservative playbook,” Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told the DCNF. “There has always been an attraction among free-marketers for the most basic type of assistance, which is a direct cash payment … Basically, you just give people money.”
In an essay entitled "American Culture Is Broken; Is Theonomy the Answer?" at The Gospel Coalition, Andrew T. Walker come to the conclusion that it's not:
There are serious criticisms of the movement—criticisms so severe that Theonomy should be repudiated as an evangelical framework for understanding the mission of the church and the relationship between civil and sacred, eternal authority and spiritual authority.
In sum, the error of Theonomy is that its hermeneutic stretches beyond the Bible’s understanding of its own authority. From this mistaken hermeneutic comes serious distortions, with drastic consequences for the church’s role in fallen political orders.
Theonomy is a facile hermeneutic that channels an eschatology of triumph. Historically undesirable, it instrumentalizes religion, blurs church-state relationships, and jeopardizes religious dissent. And it proves unnecessary because of how other covenants showcase the benefits of common grace and natural law.
Rather than become mired in interpretive problems amply demonstrated by many conservative scholars elsewhere, the simplest observation to make about Theonomy as a hermeneutic is that it misunderstands the relationship between the old covenant and the new covenant—which leads to misapplications today.
It correctly stresses a continuity in the original moral force behind Israel’s civil law. It overlooks, however, the covenantal discontinuity in applying and enforcing the particulars of Israel’s civil law, especially since theocratic Israel’s expiration. God’s purposes with Israel were unique in design compared to his relationship with other nations.
The laws God laid down with Israel were meant to enforce and protect the exclusivity of that relationship. Israel thus played a singular role that other nations aren’t called to replicate down to the level of their judicial laws.
Believing that Israel’s civil law serves as a model for contemporary civil government, Theonomy tends to downplay the moral law’s existence predating Israel and Ten Commandments. But murder, for instance, wasn’t permissible until the sixth commandment prohibited it. It was wrong from the beginning (Gen. 1; 4; 9) because it destroys an image-bearer of God. It is rooted in who God is and his purposes for creation, as revealed from the very beginning.
American Enterprise Institute scholar James Pethokoukis asks "Does America Really Have An Infrastructure Crisis?" and concludes that it doesn't:
America doesn’t have an infrastructure crisis. Nor does it have a job crisis, even though Biden chose to put that in the name of his plan. If current economic forecasts are anywhere close to being correct, the story of 2021 will be one of rapid economic growth and plunging unemployment. Don’t forget that before the pandemic, the unemployment rate was at a 50-year low, and wages were rising fastest for lower-income workers. The economy didn’t look in need of reimagining just over a year ago. It just needed a tight labor market. That might well be where we are headed again thanks to both the reopening economy and a tsunami of already approved federal spending. By the way: It’s kind of a red flag when politicians talk about infrastructure in terms of jobs created. The goal of an infrastructure program should be to create better infrastructure. Government at all levels should focus on building and maintaining the most compelling projects.
Brings to mind Bastiat's broken window theory.
