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A Disingenuous USA Department of Justice

The Department of Justice Says It Will “Vigorously” Defend Religious Exemption for Christian Institutions, But What Is the Biden Administration Actually Up To?

One insight into how things actually work in Washington, D.C. is that sometimes they are almost the opposite of what they appear to be and that is the case with the headlines coming out telling us that the Justice Department is now going to say that it will vigorously defend the right of Christian institutions to operate on Christian principles when it comes to a current federal lawsuit. The story requires some unpacking. The current federal lawsuit is known as Hunter v. U.S. Department of Education. The man behind this in many ways is Paul Carlos Southwick. He has brought cause against the Department of Education charging that the department's exemption for Christian colleges and universities when it comes to LGBTQ+ issues is unconstitutional.

The Biden administration seems to take the same position as Mr. Southwick. The Biden administration in support of the Equality Act of which it is chief champion has not allowed for any religious exemption. So why is it that the Biden administration's Justice Department would say that it is going to defend the current federal law? Why not allow the Christian colleges and their representatives to do this, to make the case? The answer is the Justice Department is really arguing that it will take this role in defense of federal law so that it will not be defended very vigorously at all. The announcement that came yesterday tells us that the Justice Department is arguing that it and it alone will defend the Department of Education's current policy that includes that exemption in the federal courts.

What the Justice Department is really doing is saying that it does not want to allow attorneys for the Christian colleges and universities to be able to make the case themselves. The Justice Department went so far as to use the word vigorous, as in vigorously defending the law. But there's very good reason to believe that behind this is a very vigorous attempt to do exactly the opposite, or at the very least, to subvert the arguments that might be made by the Christian colleges and universities if they represented themselves in the arguments before the federal courts. What is this exemption? It's an exemption for Christian or for religious colleges and universities when it comes to the application of Title IX, which we are now told includes gender identification and sexual orientation as protected categories.

Unless this exemption holds, no Christian institution that is taking federal student aid funds will be able to continue to operate on Christian principles on the basis of a Christian biblical morality, say just the definition of marriage. This issue came to the fore. We all saw it coming. The Chief Justice of the United States and Justice Samuel Alito in the oral arguments for the Obergefell decision that legalized same marriage raised the alarm. In that case in dissenting opinions, and in further cases, conservatives on the high court have warned lookout. The religious exemption is right in the middle of the bullseye. Taken at face value, the legalization of same-sex marriage when it intersects with federal non-discrimination laws means that Christian colleges will no longer be able to operate on Christian conviction.

The question that was raised by the Chief Justice and also by Justice Alito had to do with whether or not, for example, a Christian college or university would be required to house same-sex couples presenting themselves as married just like any other married couple that would fit the biblical definition of marriage. In other words, the colleges would have to abandon their biblical understanding of marriage. You might recall that the then Solicitor General of the United States who does represent the United States from the Justice Department, then it was the Obama administration, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli answered the question it will be an issue. Well, of course it will be an issue. It's an issue right now, and right now, this very same administration is seeking to force a college in Arkansas, a Christian college, to abandon its convictions when it comes to its housing on campus precisely as the Chief Justice had warned.

Now, you have the very same administration saying that it will vigorously defend the exemption in the law. Now, behind that is something we just need to note, and that is that under any normal circumstance, it is the constitutional responsibility of the United States Department of Justice to seek to defend the laws of the United States. In this case, that exemption has the force of law. But there is really a bigger drama here and that drama here is what is going on behind the scenes. Why is it that the Biden administration that has sought to eliminate these exemptions with the Equality Act, that has sought to eliminate these exemptions when it comes to say even just one Christian college, university there in Arkansas, what is the administration up to in this case? Well, it's interesting.

For one thing, the administration's being criticized by the left, but it's the left that doesn't understand what's going on. For example, a headline in The Independent, a London newspaper reports the issue this way, "Biden under fire for defending Christian schools in anti-LGBTQ+ case: 'The government is aligning with hate.'" Gino Spocchia reports, "Joe Biden is facing criticism from LGBTQ+ rights campaigners after his Justice Department backed federally funded Christian schools in a discrimination case. In a court filing in Oregon, the US Department of Education informed a court that its interests were identical to faith schools discriminating on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity." "It continued," says The Independent, "by offering its backing for Christian schools to be exempt from federal laws banning LGBT+ discrimination. The schools in question are funded in part by the US government."

Paul Carlos Southwick who is the man who brought the case against the government, he is against the exemption for Christian colleges and universities. He said, "What this means is that the government is now aligning itself with anti-LGBTQ hate in order to vigorously defend an exemption that everyone knows causes severe harm to LGBTQ students using taxpayer money." Well, of course, we're going to argue that it is not true that everybody knows that because it is profoundly not true. But nonetheless, what is true is that the Biden administration through the Department of Justice says, "It's got it. It's got the case. Don't worry about it. It will vigorously defend the exemption." But at the same time, all the signals are being sent that the reality is exactly the opposite.

It's also very interesting that the clarification of what the Biden administration's actually up to in the Department of Justice also comes from the left. In this case, it appears at Slate and the author of the article is Mark Joseph Stern, the headline, "No, the Biden administration isn't betraying its support for LGBTQ rights." Here's what Stern tells us, "On Wednesday, the Department of Justice told a federal court that it intends to defend a federal law that allows private religious colleges and universities to discriminate against LGBTQ students." "At first blush," Stern writes, "The DOJ's filing and Hunter v. Department of Education may seem surprising. President Joe Biden has after all promised to promote LGBTQ rights, including the rights to all students to receive an equal education."

Now, just put that in actual terminology about what it means in this case. It means the Biden ministration wants to deny the exemptions that would allow Christian institutions to operate on Christian principles. The article by Stern continues, "But the Biden administration's move, in this case, Hunter, should not be interpreted as a betrayal of these values. The Justice Department is not only following its general obligation to defend federal laws, it is also trying to prevent a Christian organization from taking over the defense and mounting extreme arguments that could lead to a devastating subversion of civil rights law." "Biden's progressive supporters may be offended by the DOJ's defense of discrimination, but the alternative is almost certainly worse."

Well, there you have it. That's the only plausible explanation, the Biden administration is not reversing course. It is simply preventing a Christian organization from having its own representatives to make the case before the federal courts because the Biden administration doesn't want those arguments on behalf of the Christian colleges made on the terms that those colleges would make the arguments. It wants to make a very different defense through the Department of Justice and we know what that means. It's right here candidly. It is the fact that it really wants to weaken the exemption, if not to defeat it, by controlling the case for it in what arguments are actually made before the federal courts.

Later in Stern's article, he tells us, "Why then is the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities so eager to insert itself into this litigation?" Now, remember that's what's going on here. These Christian colleges wanted to represent the case themselves, to have their attorneys argue the case, but they would have made far stronger arguments than the Biden administration's Justice Department will make. The arguments made by this Justice Department might actually be not only as strong as those Christian colleges might've made the arguments, they might actually be arguments intended to subvert the exemption to make it more likely the court would strike it down.

Answering his own question as to why the Christian colleges through their own organization might want to make the case, he said, "The likely answer can be found elsewhere in the filing, 'which makes sweeping arguments about religious schools' right to discriminate the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities declared its intent to establish that the Title IX exemption is not only lawful, but is constitutionally required'." Well, that's also extremely revealing. I think Stern's absolutely right. The Justice Department did not want these Christian colleges to be able to make the case in the federal courts that the exemption is not only allowable, but rather it is required by the Constitution in order to honor the Constitution's explicit guarantee of religious liberty.

As we began, there's a lot more to this story than meets the eye, and that's why you have confusing headlines about what the Justice Department of the Biden administration is actually up to. What it's up to is continuing the effort that it has declared from the beginning, that the President made clear when he was a candidate, that he is not going to honor these religious exemptions, and now his Justice Department isn't even going to allow these colleges and universities to make the case on their own behalf.
 
Project MKUltra is the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects that were designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, some of which were illegal.

Operation Gladio is the code name for clandestine "stay-behind" operations of armed resistance that were organized by the Western Union, and subsequently by NATO and the CIA, in collaboration with several European intelligence agencies.
 
What Happened To You?
The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism
Andrew Sullivan
Substack
July 9, 2021

“What happened to you?”

It’s a question I get a lot on Twitter. “When did you become so far right?” “Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenicist?” Or, of course: “See! I told you who he really was! Just take the hood off, Sully!” It’s trolling, mainly. And it’s a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the kind of emotional blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses. But it’s worth answering, a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics. Because it seems to me that the dynamic should really be the other way round.

The real question is: what happened to you?

The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.

But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?

What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.

Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.

This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.

The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).

A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing. The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations in the Atlantic and his subsequent, gut-wrenching memoir, “Between The World And Me.” He combined the worldview and vocabulary of CRT with the vivid lived experience of his own biography. He is a beautifully gifted writer, and I am not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to, in what many of his blog readers called his "blue period."

The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.

In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)

And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.

What happened to me? You know what I want to know: What on earth has happened to you?

I have exactly the same principles and support most of the same policies I did under Barak Obama. In fact, I’ve moved left on economic and foreign policy since then. It’s Democrats who have taken a sudden, giant swerve away from their recent past.

At the moment, I’m recording an audiobook for a new collection of my writing, from 1989 - 2021, "Out on a Limb," to be published next month. (More to come on that next week.) It covers the Obama years, including my impression in May 2007 that he’d be the next president and why I found him so appealing a figure. It’s been a shocking reminder of how our politics has been transformed since then:

My favorite moment was a very simple one. He referred to the anniversary of the March on Selma, how he went and how he came back and someone (I don’t remember who now) said to him: “That was a great celebration of African-American history.” To which Obama said he replied: “No, no, no, no, no. That was not a great celebration of African-American history. That was a celebration of American history.”

How much further can you get from the ideology of the 1619 Project — that rejects any notion of white contributions to black freedom? In his Jeremiah Wright speech, the best of his career, this is what Obama said of Wright’s CRT-inspired words, damning America:

They expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America... The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country—a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

This is what I still believe. Do you?

A plank of successor ideology, for example, is that the only and exclusive reason for racial inequality is “white supremacy.” Culture, economics, poverty, criminality, family structure: all are irrelevant, unless seen as mere emanations of white control. Even discussing these complicated factors is racist, according to Ibram X Kendi.

Obama was a straddler, of course, and did not deny that “so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” I don’t deny that either. Who could? But neither did he deny African-American agency or responsibility:

It means taking full responsibility for own lives — by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

To say this today would evoke instant accusations of being a white supremacist and racist. That’s how far the left has moved: Obama as an enabler of white supremacy. You keep asking: what happened to me? I remain an Obamacon, same as I always have been. What, in contrast, has happened to you?

Check out this really insightful interview of Wes Yang by Matt Taibbi. Yang beautifully explains the radical shift in elite opinion. He notes the ascending rhetoric: “So there’s a line in an n+1 essay, where the person is saying, ‘Oh, we are now menaced by whiteness and masculinity.’ Whereas in the past, we would have said, ‘Oh, we’re menaced by racism and sexism.’” He sees what this movement is about: the end of due process, the rejection of even an attempt at objectivity, a belief in active race and sex discrimination (“equity”) to counter the legacy of the past, the purging of ideological diversity, and the replacement of liberal education with left-indoctrination.

Yang sees the attempt to dismantle the entire carapace of liberal society and liberal institutions: “[The proponents of the successor ideology are] not trying to be malicious, but they are trying to basically annihilate a lot of the foundational processes that we depend upon and then remake them anew. You operate from the starting point that all the previous ideologies, methods, and processes are untrustworthy, because they produced this outcome previously, so we’ve got to remake all of them.” Precisely. This is a revolution against liberalism commanded from above.

Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone.

Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Non-violence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Color-blindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.

It is absolutely no accident that this illiberal ideology has no qualms whatever with illiberal methods. The latter springs intrinsically from the former. Kendi, feted across the establishment, favors amending the Constitution to appoint an unelected and unaccountable committee of “experts” that has the power to coerce and punish any individual or group anywhere in the country deemed practicing racism. Intent does not matter. And the decisions are final. An advocate for unaccountable, totalitarian control of our society is the darling of every single elite institution in America, and is routinely given platforms where no tough questioning of him is allowed. He is as dumb as Obama is smart; as crude as Obama is nuanced; as authoritarian as Obama is liberal.

Or check out Kevin Drum’s analysis of sysmmetric polarization these past few decades. He shows relentlessly that over the past few decades, it’s Democrats who have veered most decisively to the extremes on policy on cultural issues since the 1990s. Not Republicans. Democrats.

On immigration, Republicans have moved around five points to the right; the Democrats 35 points to the left. On abortion, Republicans who advocate a total ban have increased their numbers a couple of points since 1994; Democrats who favor legality in every instance has risen 20 points. On guns, the GOP has moved ten points right; Dems 20 points left.

It is also no accident that, as Drum notes and as David Shor has shown: “white academic theories of racism — and probably the whole woke movement in general —have turned off many moderate Black and Hispanic voters.” This is why even a huge economic boom may not be enough to keep the Democrats in power next year.

We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown. It nearly lost the Democrats the last election. Only Biden’s seeming moderation, the wisdom of black Democratic primary voters,and the profound ugliness of Trump wrested the presidency from a vicious demagogue, whose contempt for our system of government appears ever greater the more we find out about his term in office.

But as Wes Yang notes, Biden has also aided and abetted and justified this radicalism. He has instituted a huge program of overt government race and sex discrimination throughout every policy and area of government; he backs decimating due process for sexual accusations on campus; he favors abolishing religious freedom as a defense of anti-gay discrimination; he believes that gender identity should replace sex as a legal category, and gender identity should rest entirely on self-disclosure; he favors expediting and maximizing mass immigration, not stemming it. In Yang’s rather brutal assessment, for the hard left, “what they saw is that with Joe Biden, who’s this throwback figure, the activists could all rush to him and get most of what they wanted from him anyway.”

Does that mean we should support an increasingly nihilist cult on the right among the GOP? Of course not. Does it mean we should ignore its increasingly menacing contempt for electoral integrity and a stable democracy? Absolutely not. But one reason to fight for liberalism against the successor ideology is that its extremes are quite obviously fomenting and facilitating and inspiring ever-rising fanaticism in response. I fear the successor ideology’s Kulturkampf is already making the 2022 midterms a landslide for a cultish, unmoored GOP. In fighting S.I., we are also fighting Trump.

But I am not making a tactical argument here. I’m making a deeper moral argument. We can and must still fight and argue for what we believe in: a liberal democracy in a liberal society. This fight will not end if we just ignore it or allow ourselves to be intimidated by it, or join the tribal pile-ons. And I will not apologize for confronting this, however unpopular it might make me, just as I won’t apologize for confronting the poison and nihilism on the right. And if you really want to be on “the right side of liberalism,” you will join me.
 
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