The Conscience Chronicles

UPDATE: As this was being readied for posting, the Standing Committee on Private Bills and Private Members’ Public Bills voted to recommend that Bill 207 not move forward in its current form, meaning that the bill will not be proceeding to the floor. I have elected to post this anyway, given the possibility that the proposal might be resurrected and amended at a later date.

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At a first casual glance, the stated premise of Alberta’s Bill 207, Conscience Rights (Health Care Providers) Protection Act, might sound reasonable: most people wouldn’t expect medical professionals who object to procedures like abortion to be required to perform them.

In practice, Alberta’s College of Physicians and Surgeons already allows medical professionals to opt out of medical procedures that they have a religious objection to (a status quo that is at times problematic), so long as they provide any referral or direction to comprehensive information needed, ensuring that their patient still receives care in a timely manner. Bill 207 removes the obligation to refer and / or ensure patient care — using the reasoning that providing a referral is sort of like participating in the procedure. Regardless of any urgency or medical appropriateness of care in any given situation, this change allows refusals to increase the time delay to accessing care (regardless of any urgency), put the burden of medical care back on the patient, and be a kind of barrier and discouragement, if not more. Indeed, it can be like making someone start over from scratch. Proponents of the bill say that because medical care is still available elsewhere, it isn’t really being denied, which is technically true… but the time, emotional and informational barriers cannot be discounted.

But while those advancing the bill claim it is only codifying that status quo in law, there are more things that Bill 207 does, many of which have received little attention by media.

The bill extends conscience rights to health care organizations, as well. While religious care organizations have already asserted conscience objections in many ways already, this codifies it in law. It also allows organizations to assert their conscience-based decisions over those of their facilities, staff and resources. By way of example, Covenant Health (Canada’s largest Catholic health care provider) owns 16 health care facilities throughout the province, including two major hospitals in Edmonton; its affiliate Covenant Care owns another seven assisted living and long-term care facilities. In some rural areas of Alberta, all or most facilities are religious-owned.

In short, this moves Alberta down a landscape in which anyone in the chain of service provision — from facility administration to lab technician and pharmacist — can create a roadblock to services, without consequence. This becomes even more concerning when one realizes the potential for administrative staff, clergy or even outside groups to apply pressure to doctors and clinics to deny services that they might not otherwise have initially had objections to.

In fact, by the text of the law, it is left entirely up to the health care provider or religious health care organization to determine if their conscientious beliefs would be infringed, and there really is no appeal process to see if there is some agreeable compromise. No record is kept, leaving no way to follow up to ascertain if the patient has ever received the care they needed or sought. Gathering statistics about patients denied care in order to inspect what consequences the law has had becomes impossible, as demonstrated elsewhere.

By the text of the law, if a regulatory body receives a complaint about denial of care having to do with conscience, the complaint must be discarded (there is a caveat that complaints or portions thereof that are not conscience-related are not discarded). They are not allowed to investigate or question the decision:

5(1)  On receiving a complaint in accordance with section 55(1) of the Health Professions Act, the subject matter of which is a health care provider’s decision not to provide a health care service based on their conscientious beliefs, the complaints director for the regulatory body that received the complaint must immediately

(a) dismiss the complaint, and

(b) provide notice of the dismissal to the complainant.

It also specifies that by law, “a health care provider’s decision to not provide a health care service based on their conscientious beliefs is not to be considered as unprofessional conduct,” and providers and / or organizations are immediately shielded from legal liability.

There is also an amendment to Section 7(1) of the Alberta Human Rights Act, to immediately shield any employee from termination or discrimination based on their conscientious beliefs. This amendment is not restricted in any way to the medical profession, and could conceivably provide a shield for harassment and abuse of one’s co-workers or customers because of one’s religious or conscientious beliefs.

The bill’s proponent, MLA Dan Williams, has promised a number of amendments to Bill 207, but in those proposed changes, none of these points is substantively changed. One of his proposals — to restore a duty to assist “if not providing the health care service would result in an imminent risk of death” — isn’t altogether reassuring about the thought that was put into the bill in the first place… but even with that change, there is no clarification on whether or how the legal shield and barriers to reporting and investigation might be changed in the event of a patient’s death (especially in cases in which it was not thought that there would be an “imminent risk”).

There are many hypothetical situations that one can suggest could arise as a result of this legislation. But this is not uncharted territory. It is very easy to look at places where “conscience” exemptions have been implemented or attempted — or where medical personnel or organizations have attempted to assert their conscience rights — and see how it has affected medical care for patients.

“I was nervous and excited about the consult for my first intrauterine device (IUD) at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. After a brief conversation, Dr. Case (a pseudonym) asked me to get off the exam table and follow her to her office for a ‘chat.’ But in her office, when the door was safely shut, my excitement slowly started to fade. ‘Well, first things first, this is a Catholic hospital,’ she said in a mock whisper…”

Evann Normandin, writing at Rewire this past May, described what happened to her when hospital policy prevented her from getting an IUD. She left with a referral… and shaming. Although referrals don’t come with the added expense of multiple visits in Alberta, like south of the border, the expense of time and transportation remain, and can pale in comparison to the emotional cost of the refusal itself:

“… On my way out of the labyrinthian building, I scrunched up the unofficial paper in my hand. The ripped edges felt sharp against my skin. In the Uber ride home, after paying transportation to and from my apartment to a world-class hospital and forking over a $50 copay for unsolicited advice about my vagina, I cried…”

At Huffington Post, Ace Ratcliff described her fight with doctors over her need for a hysterectomy:

“My illness’ severity [hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome] led me to the conclusion early on that childbirth would irreparably damage my already broken body and would never be the right choice for me. My joints dislocate painfully and at random. I have difficulty swallowing food. I bruise like an overripe peach. I faint if I have to stand for too long. Wounds take much longer to heal on me than on a normal human.

“… Somehow, my personal autonomy, my health and my comfort didn’t rate high enough to outrank the desires of my future, then-nonexistent partner. And nothing I said could change my doctors’ minds [about a surgical hysterectomy], not the stories about my frequently dislocating hips, my mom’s complicated pregnancies or the increased rate of miscarriage and preterm labor for EDS patients…”

In another instance, the hospital’s policies would have allowed the removal of a dislodged IUD, but the doctor thought the policies wouldn’t, and refused care. The patient was sent home, limited in her options by her insurance company (not applicable in Alberta, but limits on options can occur because of other factors, such as rural accessibility), and she ultimately had to file suit:

“Her doctor confirmed the IUD was dislodged and had to be removed. But the doctor said she would be unable to remove the IUD, citing Catholic restrictions followed by Mercy Hospital and Medical Center and providers within its system.

“… It felt heartbreaking,” Jones told Rewire. “It felt like they were telling me that I had done something wrong, that I had made a mistake and therefore they were not going to help me; that they stigmatized me, saying that I was doing something wrong, when I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m doing something that’s well within my legal rights…”

Something that Bill 207 does not address at all is any duty of physicians to discuss every option available to a patient. If referring is equated to participating in an objected-to procedure or medication, then one might tacitly assume that providing comprehensive information on that procedure or medication can be denied. Withholding medical information can have serious consequences:

“… a woman was traveling across the Midwest when she developed abdominal pain. She and her husband went to the nearest hospital, where she was diagnosed with a potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy. The doctors recommended immediate surgery to remove the fallopian tube containing the misplaced embryo, a procedure that would reduce by half her future chances of conceiving a child. They failed to mention that a simple injection of Methotrexate could solve the problem, leaving her fertility intact. (In fact, at a secular hospital she found on her smart phone, it subsequently did.) Why the omission? The Catholic hospital where she got diagnosed was subject to the “Ethical and Religious Directives” of the Catholic bishops, which state, “In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion…'”

In fact, denial of comprehensive information is a recurring issue when medical conscience exemptions are asserted.

Of course, some of these examples focus on the emotional impact, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t serious physical consequences potentially at stake:

“After about 10 hours, the patient’s temperature soared to 102 or 103 degrees, Ralph recalled in an interview with Rewire in June, a few months after the incident. Ralph and her team gave the patient medication to induce labor. But Ralph could not administer mifepristone, which the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) considers part of the most effective drug regimen for such cases. The Catholic hospital didn’t carry the drug, which is commonly used for medication abortions—a failure Ralph believes was religiously motivated and needlessly prolonged her patient’s labor.

“… For more than 24 hours, the patient labored through painful contractions. She bled heavily, requiring at least one blood transfusion. Her lips and face lost their color. Finally, she delivered a fetus that had no hope of survival…”

The full extent of Bill 207’s reach isn’t understood either, until you realize that “medical provider” covers a wide range, as noted in an Edmonton Journal editorial:

“The list is long and includes emergency, primary and critical care paramedics; midwives, chiropractors, podiatrists, psychologists and psychiatrists; lab, respiratory, ultrasound and X-ray technologists; pharmacists, physiotherapists and physical therapists; opticians and optometrists; dieticians and nutritionists; anesthesiologists, surgeons, and social workers; audiologists, dental professionals and speech-language pathologists…”

The inclusion of pharmacists in that list raises the question about access to birth control, an issue that has already surfaced in Alberta and elsewhere in Canada:

“Joan Chand’oiseau of Calgary recently posted a photo on Facebook of a sign on her physician’s office door that read, ‘Please be informed that the physician on duty today will not prescribe the birth control pill…’”

It also raises questions about access to hormone therapy for trans patients, or the possibility of throwing in a bit of public humiliation for good measure:

“‘Sir, we canceled your prescription because we couldn’t figure out why a man would need female hormones,’ said the voice. ‘You’ll have to have your doctor call us to confirm this is correct because it doesn’t make any sense…'”

Indeed, trans health is just as likely to be impacted as reproductive health, and doesn’t even have to be about transition-related medical concerns. Trans people regularly report what they’ve nicknamed ‘Trans Broken Arm Syndrome‘ — that is, the refusal of care for basic health services just because they’re trans. And it does indeed happen in Canada:

“According to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan’s charge of unprofessional conduct and the penalty presentation, the incident took place on Jan. 5, 2016, when Anderson saw a patient for “reasons related to bronchitis” — something completely unrelated to the patient’s transition to male from female.”According to the documents, the disciplinary hearing committee found it ‘probable’ that Anderson ‘launched into an unsolicited running commentary’ regarding transitioning. Anderson made statements ‘which were insensitive and unrelated to the reasons for which the patient requested your medical services,’ according to the charges against Anderson…”

It should also be asked what conscience protections might do to protect the still-persistent practices of reparative therapy in Alberta (albeit with coded language). But that aside, denial of basic care is something that all LGBTQ+ people have had to worry about, sometimes even with lethal effect in situations that didn’t initially seem to pose an “imminent risk”:

“Refusing to treat patients can be be deadly, as was the case in 1995, when Tyra Hunter, a transgender woman, lost her life after emergency medical technicians refused to assist her at the scene of a car accident. According to the Center for American Progress, had Hunter received care, her chances of surviving were 86 percent — she should have lived…”

Medical assistance in dying is another area in which medical access is an issue, and in this instance, access is even more seriously limited. It is estimated that the aforementioned Covenant Health (and affiliates) oversee up to 90% of the long-term care beds in parts of Alberta, and regardless of whether long-term care patients are healthy enough to be moved, doing so is sometimes necessary just have questions answered, because of facility policies:

“Covenant Health stated in May of 2016 that it has an ‘ethical and moral opposition to medical assistance in dying’ and that the organization’s ‘unequivocal position to not provide or explicitly refer’ must be recognized. Functionally, this means that any assessment of capacity, any answering of technical questions, and the act of assistance in dying itself would require a transfer away from a Covenant facility.

“… The case of Ian Shearer, an 84-year-old Calgary man living in Vancouver with palliative heart and kidney disease and severe chronic pain, brought attention to how transfers can do harm. Shearer was denied a request for medical assistance in dying from St. Paul’s Hospital, a Catholic facility near where he lived and where he’d been admitted for care. On the day he chose to die, his ambulance was delayed three hours and his medications were withheld to allow him to confirm consent. The ordeal, last August, was described by his daughter as ‘unnecessary… excruciating suffering…'”

Obviously, the out-of-province and out-of-country examples won’t exactly mirror what would happen in Alberta, because of circumstantial differences in things like medical coverage, but what this demonstrates is the extent to which individuals might be willing to abuse a conscience protection, and the twists of logic involved. From the firing of doctors for not adhering to an organization’s conscience policies, to the chilling effect on medical care caused by activism from anti-abortion groups against clinics just for hiring doctors who’ve performed abortions elsewhere in the past, to medical residents who openly vowed to give the wrong medications to specific groups of people, to some some truly backwards beliefs about medical interventions…

“Throughout the conference’s diverse and highly academic presentations, one discernible theme emerged, namely, that “brain death” has been invented to harvest viable organs from still-living people. Only when a person’s heart stops beating and their breathing ceases for a determinate amount of time can it be said that death has truly occurred…”

… the politics surrounding medical conscience exemptions raises a broad range of concerns.

It is likely that Alberta’s Bill 207 would not survive a legal challenge. Indeed, the same day that the bill was introduced in the Alberta Legislature, a similar policy was overturned in the U.S. Likewise, a ruling in Ontario last May affirmed patients’ rights to referrals when care is denied.

But getting there could be another long, legally costly process, with very real human collateral damage caused along the way.

Photo: Adobe Stock

(crossposted to rabble.ca)

On “Unalienable” Human Rights

Screen capture, launch of the Commission on Unalienable Rights

On Monday, July 8th, the U.S. State Department announced the launch of a Commission on Unalienable Rights, which is intended to rethink and reshape how human rights laws are applied around the world. This Commission was deemed necessary to ensure that “human rights discourse not be corrupted or hijacked or used for dubious or malignant purposes,” though in that founding statement, the Department failed to explain how this was supposedly happening, or who was said to be hijacking said discourse.

Reporting about this development immediately raised concerns that the Commission’s mandate could negatively impact and specifically target LGBTQ+ human rights protections, but there could be dire ramifications for reproductive rights, sex-based rights, and the rights of migrants, as well. Although the wording of the announcement is vague to a degree, religious conservatives clearly expect the project “to address concerns about religious freedom [which they feel is violated by LGBTQ+ human rights accommodations] and abortion,” at the least.

In announcing the Commission, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rationalized that by delineating protected classes in human rights laws, “politicians and bureaucrats… blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights granted by governments. Unalienable rights are by nature universal. Not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right….”

This is a common talking point among religious conservatives, who argue that human rights cannot be granted by “politicians and bureaucrats” (i.e. courts and human rights commissions), but by God alone. The given rationale for that thinking is that human rights should be subsumed under “natural law and nature’s god.” Certainly, when this Commission on Unalienable Rights was first announced at the end of May, the State Department lamented that human rights “discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights” – although this phrasing proved to be so transparent to media outlets that the word “natural” was absent from the Monday’s launch.

Of course, fixating on nature is a fallacious way of limiting rights to exclude the obvious intended targets. Same-sex coupling occurs in nature. Changing sexes occurs in nature. Reproductive limiting and parental choice occurs in nature (though the means can seem shocking and visceral). Polyamory occurs in nature. What doesn’t occur in nature is “one-man-and-one-woman marriage,” and life-long monogamous exclusivity is only practiced by 3 to 5 percent of mammals (including humans) – and even less so in other species.

But make no mistake: excluding classes of people from human rights law is clearly the intention. Any attempt to more narrowly define whose rights are “unalienable” and therefore legitimate is, by reflection, also an exercise in determining whose rights are illegitimate, and therefore… alienable (perhaps even in the truest meaning of that word). While the State Department denied that the Commission would address “policy questions” like abortion rights, they asserted that it would instead “attempt to ground human rights in the founding principles of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'” That said, the Commission’s mandate never appeared designed to address specific issues or classes, but rather to create a rationalized hierarchy or criteria through which the exclusion or trumping of disfavoured rights becomes logically inevitable – which is a bit of semantic sleight-of-hand.

When the Commission on Unalienable Rights was first announced, it was originally to be under the auspices of Princeton professor and co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, Robert George, who reportedly drafted the original concept note and is described by peers as “revitalizing a strain of Catholic natural-law thinking that goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas.” Like the word “natural,” George is also absent from the launch, but the Commission’s roster is so overwhelmingly linked to him that its membership was almost certainly hand-picked by him.

 

The Commission is chaired by Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon, the former ambassador to the Vatican and an anti-abortion activist, who served on the US Commission on Religious Freedom (from 2012-2016, with George). She is a board member of the anti-LGBTQ+ funding group, Becket Fund, and is perhaps best known for fighting on behalf of the Holy See to prevent the inclusion of abortion rights at the 1995 U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing. She has made many troubling statements, such as: publicly condemning the Boston Globe’s expose on abuse within the Catholic Church, in 1992; referring to marriage equality as a “radical social experiment” and “not a civil rights issue, but a movement for special preference;” complaining that religious freedom is “subordinated to a whole range of other rights, claims and interests;” and calling for a “flexible universalism” in which human rights are not standardized, but contextualized according to (she quotes from the 1993 Vienna Declaration) “national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds.” In her book, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, she clearly sees abortion as an infringement on the rights of the foetus, and no-fault divorce as an infringement on the rights of children. Glendon is also not known for compromise, going as far as rejecting a medal from the University of Notre Dame because that institution also conferred then-President Barack Obama with an honorary degree, despite the fact that he supported abortion access.

For what it’s worth, she also a hired Pompeo as a research assistant, when Pompeo studied law at Harvard.

Joining Glendon is a smorgasbord of Robert George -linked and similarly-minded academics:

• Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute who responded to the overturning of sodomy laws by condemning Justice Kennedy for allegedly failing “to subject the Texas statute prohibiting homosexual sodomy to ‘rational scrutiny.'” Berkowitz calls for religious conscience to be “unhampered by government coercion,” and has written several other treatises opposed to LGBTQ+ human rights.
• Paolo Carozza, a Notre Dame law professor and long-time critic of human rights laws who, among other things, advocated for a Vatican-tinged flavour of “human dignity” as a determinate for legitimacy of human rights.
• Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, an influential American-born convert to Islam and co-founder of Zaytuna College. Yusuf told religion writer Scott Korb that “I don’t want to see gay people bashed… But I also don’t want it normalized as a healthy thing for a society… I don’t want someone to say this is a normal, healthy lifestyle. It’s not. It’s pathogenic…'”
• Jacqueline Rivers, a Harvard sociology professor, and co-founder and former executive director of the Witherspoon-sponsored Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies. Rivers is an anti-abortion speaker, and GLAAD also noted that she once “insisted that marriage equality activists are undermining the Black Civil Rights movement [by demanding human rights protections], but comforted the applauding attendees by telling them ‘God will not be mocked…'”
• Rabbi Meir Yaakov Soloveichik, a spiritual leader of Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the US. Soloveichik argued that the legalization of same-sex marriage would lead to the normalization of bestiality.
• Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice. She has been pointed to as a Democrat involved with the Commission (as though she makes the project bipartisan) – but Swett is still a “religious freedom” advocate with a Mormon-leaning multifaith background, who was also on the the US Commission on Religious Freedom, along with Mary Ann Glendon and Robert George – the latter of whom reassured religious conservatives that “She was the very opposite of a partisan or an ideologue… I did not have a different vision from Katrina, and she didn’t have a different vision from me. We were the same.”
• Christopher Tollefsen, a University of South Carolina professor, senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, prolific religious conservative writer, and co-author of the anti-abortion and anti- stem cell research book Embryo (with Robert George). Tollefsen is a devotee of Paul McHugh when it comes to trans issues, and has argued that it is not only not possible to change sex, but also “a mark of a heartless culture” to make surgeries and affirming, non-psychological treatments available to trans individuals.
• David Tse-Chien Pan (a professor at the University of California at Irvine) and Russell Berman (a Stanford University professor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute) are less clear, but Pan is a critic of “liberalism” (libertarianism), and Berman (not to be confused with a writer at The Atlantic by the same name) appears to be a critic of Islam, “left-fascism” and “campus anti-Semitism,” which may refer to protests in support of Palestinians.
• Named in only some of the announcements are Kiron Skinner (State Department director of policy planning, who “ignited controversy in May for framing the contentious US-China relationship as ‘the first time that we will have a great-power competitor that is not Caucasian’”), and attorney F. Cartwright Weiland (Rapporteur), who was a Council for Life panelist, helped write amicus briefs supporting laws restricting abortion, and is a critic (in an article expounding on board chair Mary Ann Glendon’s 1991 writing about Rights Talk) of “identity politics” and LGBTQ+ inclusion in human rights.

It’s important to contextualize all of this within the current developments in the United States under the Trump administration. Catholic and Evangelical fundamentalists (who I feel are important to differentiate from other Christians, despite their sadly often successful habit of passing off their political causes as the “Christian” position) are already seeing legal successes in restricting abortion access, and expect an overturn of Roe v Wade (and perhaps even Obergefell v Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage) by a newly-stacked conservative Supreme Court, very soon – and have been looking for directions to refocus, in order to maintain their momentum, power and following. One of these directions has been to make abortion “unthinkable,” while another has been to formalize a means for religious freedom and religious conscience to override LGBTQ+ (and other) human rights protections. A deeply biblical rewriting of human rights law could not only create a license for anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, but also completely undermine reproductive rights and entrench vastly outdated ideas about gender roles, including theological notions like “complementarianism.” For example, ThinkProgress recently noted that if a case of the so-called “Billy Graham Rule” (of religious fundamentalist men refusing to meet with women without a chaperone) were to proceed to the rightward-shifting U.S. Supreme Court while using a “religious conscience” argument, it could very well provide the basis for a legalization of sex-based discrimination, at least under specific circumstances.

This Commission is also taking place during a severe, self-inflicted crisis of anti-immigrant policy in the U.S., which has seen detention camps with atrocious conditions rightly criticized and noted for their historical parallels (even if not necessarily identical matches to past atrocities). Religious conservatives have not simply turned a blind eye to these developments, but have actually often collaboratively helped to create rationalizations for these brutal policies (especially when it comes to Muslim migrants). In this context, and under the auspices of a government that has very clearly shown the will to dehumanize migrants and refugees and trample their rights, it is not inconceivable that this Commission is designed to provide a structure by which a lesser human status for migrants is potentially justifiable.

This Commission is also contemporary to Trump’s stated intent to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide. This inevitably brought some pushback from his religious base – but only a little, while other figures took the opportunity to try to appear diplomatic, seeking to realign the center of the LGBTQ+ rights versus religious freedom (false) dichotomy by “calling for an end to all forms of physical violence against homosexuals — but [also to] refrain from imposing the values of the sexual revolution on the rest of the world.” Although the administration’s decriminalization project appears to have been driven more by U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell than by Trump himself, it is also not irreconcilable with a mandate like the Commission’s: ending overt criminal prosecution is a far cry from supporting actual human rights protections, which are a far greater level of enfranchised citizenship, and facilitate the ability to participate in society as a whole. The Commission on Unalienable Rights doesn’t have to obliterate what it determines are “illegitimate” human rights classes entirely, in order to legalize discrimination against them – it only needs to create a hierarchy which elevates those rights that it determines are “unalienable.”

And finally, this comes at a time when religious fundamentalists have successfully engineered the illusion of several false dichotomies to create the impression that human rights create irreconcilable conflicts: of LGBTQ+ rights versus religious freedom; of personhood rights versus reproductive rights; of trans rights versus sex-based rights; of parents’ rights versus childrens’ rights (though this is often treated as though the latter are non-existent); of all human rights classes versus freedom of speech; and more. Of those, personhood rights are based on a faulty premise that an undeveloped foetus that cannot exist on its own is somehow a person, and (for the most part) the remaining dichotomies are only irreconcilable if the party that wishes to do harm to the other inflexibly insists that it cannot compromise under any circumstance whatsoever – and will do whatever is necessary to frame any particular pressure to do so as persecution.

What all of this points to is a project that appears designed to rethink human rights as a structure in which some humans can be lesser.  And this is concerning, if it becomes the template by which the U.S. proceeds to push human rights discussion on the world stage, in the coming years.

If the launch of the Commission on Unalienable Rights is any indication, terms like “natural law” may be stealthily replaced by language that is far more opaque, and carefully designed to appear as though it does not target any specific groups. But in all likelihood, it will nevertheless still prioritize things like religious conscience, “dignity” (redefined as a god-granted status that is infringed upon if we make certain life choices about sexuality, a popular theme in Catholic-based discourse on “natural law”), personhood (a dog whistle that frames the foetus as a person), and (though I have not touched on it here, but it can be seen in the battles over sex education) parents’ rights, among other characteristic themes that merit further exploration.

I am sure that we will find out soon enough.

(Crossposted to rabble.ca)

“Unthinkable”

American religious conservatives have a problem.

Riding high on their partnerships with the Trump administration and the perception of being political kingmakers, they need to be sure that they will be able to sustain their momentum for years to come. And with the newly-stacked U.S. Supreme Court making the overturn of Roe v Wade a seeming inevitability (as well as putting the overturn of marriage equality within sight), they are now looking for what to do in a “post-Roe” world to retain their energy, power, and dizzying levels of funding. And in the discussions they have about that dilemma, their solution, often, is to work toward a world in which they have made abortion “unthinkable.”

“I’m not suggesting that the proposed laws are unimportant—on the contrary, pass more of them! I only wish to remind us that our goal is to make abortion unthinkable as well as illegal. And that means our work has only just begun…” –  John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, Breakpoint

When I speak about American conservatives, of course, I don’t mean to suggest that there is some central plan or hive mind. It doesn’t work that way. Even getting U.S. Evangelicals and Catholic fundamentalists onto the same page can be a challenge sometimes, and the religious nationalist industrial complex is made up of an infinite number of organizations all vying for dollars in the same fundraising pool. But there does seem to be a fairly cohesive and organic process in which talking points filter out and take shape – and “unthinkable” appears to be one such trend in linguistic spin.

The origin of this particular incarnation of the talking point (it has been mused about many times before, but not with this degree of viral spread and consistency) appears to have been January’s Evangelicals for Life conference, in which the senior vice president of Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) U.S. legal division Kristen Waggoner encouraged attendees, using the phrase. Waggoner’s encouragement came about a week after Robin Marty’s Handbook for a Post-Roe America was published, and progressive news outlets were discussing how to respond to the possibility of a patchwork or even nationwide ban on abortion. The possibility that the left might evolve to cope with a changing legal landscape – as far as EFL attendees were concerned – needed to be thought out and prepared for.

So when Ontario Member of Provincial Parliament Sam Oosterhoff tells an anti-abortion rally in Toronto that he pledges to make abortion “unthinkable in our lifetime,” it’s helpful to look at religious conservative media for clues as to what he might mean by that, and where his influences are coming from.

“New Hampshire Right to Life’s position is clear, she said. ‘We would want to put restrictions on abortions and make it unthinkable and illegal…’” – Concord Monitor

I could go at some length about how promoters of the sensationalistic and Planned Parenthood -defaming movie Unplanned seized on the phrase during their publicity tour, or how it’s turning up on Fox News, or how it came up during anti-abortion rhetoric pertaining to legislation in New York and Georgia as well as a legal ruling in Louisiana, or how it spread widely enough that even a perceived-left website like Vox gave it oxygen – but that only establishes that there is definitely a narrative. I’d much rather look at what religious conservatives are getting at, when they use the phrase.

“Every answer to why abortion is viewed as still ‘needed’ stems from a deeper-seeded issue which we could be fighting against… we need to combat the issues which give abortion supporters reasons to think it is the better ‘option.’ Abortion needs to stop being an excuse for not addressing the larger issues at hand…” – Paul Collier

If anti-abortion groups wanted to turn their attention toward addressing poverty, it would probably be a welcome development. Sadly, you won’t find a whisper of that, and doing so would probably frighten the megadonors with whom they collaborate to form the Republican / Conservative political base. But getting religious conservatives to speak candidly about specific objectives isn’t always easy. Afraid that too much transparency might allow opponents to organize effectively against them, they often restrict their public musings to dog whistle terms (of which “unthinkable” is arguably one), and stay effectively mum about which political candidates they’ve managed to get nominated as candidates in an election. But in venues seen as relatively safe and exclusive, or from pundits who are seen as less prominent, sometimes you’ll find some elaboration.

One such pundit is The Federalist’s Georgi Boorman, who actually proposed a 6-point plan. Chief among these is to “Improve Reproductive Education” – but you won’t find her making any mention of contraception (elsewhere, Boorman reveals herself to be not a fan of The Pill), condoms or family planning. There’s no direct mention of sex education in schools, either, even though it would clearly be the necessary vehicle for what she has in mind. The “reproductive education” that she speaks of is predominantly “to educate women on the dangers of” abortion (by which she means the usual far right claims about health dangers of the practice), a fetishization of the stages of fetal development, and more fearmongering about the current medical process (i.e. she cites “the horrid conditions of abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s facility” as a typical example… it’s far from it).

The remainder of Georgi Boorman’s suggestions include more criminalization (elsewhere, she openly supports the death sentence for women who abort) and the vague “celebrate life” mantra, as well as increasing support for adoption (“especially cross-racial,” she adds, stealthily riffing on anti-abortion groups’ efforts to portray the procedure as a kind of racist genocide perpetrated by leftists) and – of course – ramping up funding for anti-abortion fake pregnancy centres.

On these points, her proposals are within the purview of those of Abby Johnson, whose own proposals are steeped in proselytizing and expanding anti-abortion pregnancy counseling centers into additional areas that beatify motherhood, but do not provide any hints of information about contraception or family planning (other than, perhaps, the “rhythm method”). But Boorman also adds a notable comment about “support[ing] fatherhood”:

“… what if fathers were asked to step up as parents and providers, instead of being written off as unqualified sperm donors? What if our culture demanded it? … Millions of fathers have been robbed of this opportunity since Roe, and our welfare system has enabled this by disincentivizing marriage and fatherhood obligations. … Instead of affirming mothers’ unilateral decisions by default, we should encourage fathers’ involvement (including marriage)…”

When religious conservatives frame opposition to gay and trans human rights as “protecting marriage,” LGBTQ+ organizations and spokespeople often quip about the hypocrisy in their seeming lack of worry about divorce and cohabitation. But the fact of the matter is that anti- groups have never stopped tilting at those particular windmills, either. An outright ban on divorce is only touted by the most extreme among them, but “disincentivizing” and creating an institutional system that heavily favours marriage come up often, and the idea of restricting divorce or making it difficult retains some level of popularity.

Other religious conservatives are more ambitious. Around the same time that Kristen Waggoner was proposing that abortion be made unthinkable, the Heritage Foundation hosted Sue Ellen Browder, who claims that “the sexual revolution hijacked the women’s movement” to make abortion and contraception priorities. This, too, is not a new argument, but it is gaining new popularity with organizations seeking to keep the money rolling in after an overturn of Roe. And with anti-trans, anti-sex work and anti-porn feminists partnering with religious conservatives like never before, there appears to be a sense that they have an opportunity to co-opt womens’ rights, which can then be used as a shield against accusations of homophobia, Islamophobia and puritanism, while at the same time purging it of reproductive rights advocacy and sex positivity, maintaining a subordinated role for women in administrative areas, and asserting the doctrine of complementarianism (a teaching used both to mandate motherhood as a woman’s integral life goal, and to invalidate LGBTQ+ peoples’ rights to live their lives as they need to).

“The battle against feminism is better fought by women because the public has been convinced that men are not qualified to speak about issues that affect the fairer sex…” – John Horvat II

On this point, James V. Schall suggests that religious conservatives need to target the entirety of the sexual revolution: “The path, when spelled out, is a direct line from divorce, contraception, and abortion to single-sex ‘marriage,’ in-vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, and designer babies and now to a refusal to continue to increase and multiply with transgenderism, population decline, and, ultimately euthanasia… If we were to eliminate abortion, we must freely stop committing the sins that initiate disordered conceptions… Without this conversion, we will continue on the same path on which we now are traveling…”The Federalist’s Cullen Herout (which, admit it, must be a pseudonym) agrees at least on the point about contraception, saying “… if the goal really is to make abortion unthinkable, that cannot and will not happen without a large-scale shift in our cultural attitude toward human sexuality and contraception…”

So the next time your local political representative muses about making abortion “unthinkable,” it’s only reasonable to press them to elaborate. Because there clearly is more to that statement – and while religious conservatives obviously don’t think in total homogeneity, there’s enough like-mindedness to view this sort of dog whistle with alarm.

The Alberta Advantage was Dependence

In the end, the “Alberta Advantage” was dependence.

And in retrospect, undoing that dependence on the oil industry — a mixture of real and perceived — needed to be the number one priority of the Notley NDP government. When Albertans (even to their own surprise) overthrew the 40-year Progressive Conservative dynasty in 2015, they were hungry for change, and they knew that change was both inevitable and urgent, given the realities of global climate change — something they had been increasingly experiencing (most notably when the third “one-in-a-hundred-year flood” in ten years ate High River and parts of downtown Calgary).

Instead, industry managed to keep the focus on oil development and pipelines, and sucked all of the rest of the political and economic air out of the room.

Of course, Alberta’s energy sector is well-versed in fostering and using the dependence on its jobs and products — whether manipulating gas prices, making punitive and excessive layoffs whenever an administration or policy it doesn’t like is in place, or dangling illusionary carrots, like job creation estimates that factor in a hundredfold of jobs that they imagine might be generated by their project (and which nobody ever follows up on to debunk). In reality, building a pipeline creates merely a small number of regionally-shifting jobs aimed at transporting the longer-term refining jobs out-of-country, but nobody really ever remarks on that, because of how overwhelmed with industry propaganda Albertans are, and their eagerness for what little crumbs industry is willing to toss their way.

Now, the rest of Canada might not be overly sympathetic to Alberta’s plight, right now, because the province has had a pretty good run, riding waves of oil prices over the past few decades to sustained prosperity, while labour markets elsewhere have dwindled, automated, and relocated to other countries. Consequently, Alberta may feel the coming change more acutely than the rest of Canada — but feel it everyone will.

Change is hard. It’s disruptive. And with the level of budgetary dependence on energy royalties and the perceived dependence (thanks to the hard work of neoliberal institutions like the Fraser, CAPP and corporate media) of everyone’s jobs on oil development, Alberta has had four years of reckoning that haven’t really done anything to assuage any of the associated fears that come with that change.

To be fair, that transition was never something that was going to be able to take place in a scant four years.

Additionally, the Notley NDP have tried to break some of that sense of dependence through diversification. It’s something that hasn’t been well-publicized, but it also needed to be more aggressively pursued. And diversification is only one step — job retraining and the economic support and optimism needed to get through it are more critical. Albertans looked to Rachel Notley to lead them into and through a transition, and somewhere along the way, industry convinced the government and the public alike that the transition was yet another pipeline.

Consequently, we find ourselves at a crossroads in which Albertans seem receptive to old, failed conservative policies of austerity and corporate giveaways, regardless of the ethical concerns with a guy who may have broken electoral laws in order to become party leader, and regardless of whether he has surrounded himself with lake-of-fire social conservatives and semi-open white nationalists. It’s why we’ve seen people who’ve never protested before come out to agitate for pipelines, and naively allowed themselves to get hijacked by and aligned with racist wingnuts who’d previously floundered on the fringe for decades. Despite the stereotype of the Albertan redneck, Albertans have always tended toward worrying about the money, and not caring about the social positions that have aligned themselves with it (which is, in a way, even worse).

But here’s the clincher: a pipeline isn’t going to slow or stop the one-in-a-hundred-year floods, or the summer seasons that might soon be renamed “Smoke,” or the fracking-triggered earthquakes. And electing a traditional oil crony is more likely to undo the first steps that Alberta has taken than to make those hard choices. Because the longer Alberta tries to forestall its transition, the more abrupt, disruptive, and devastating that eventual change is going to be.

(crossposted to rabble.ca)

Free Speech, When The “Debate” is You (and You’re Not Invited)

There’s a duplicitous game of sleight-of-hand that is taking place in discussions about freedom of speech in academia and the public square.

Here’s how it works: at first, a person fishes for controversy by saying several things that they know will offend people.  If this garners enough attention, then the process recurs organically — say, whenever a politician wants to reference the controversy as a coded dog whistle to their base, or when a teaching assistant replays a recording in class because she thinks the discussion is interesting and challenging.

And the moment the people targeted by that discussion get angry and protest, they’re described not as being upset about the content of what is being said, but rather their protest is reframed as opposing freedom of speech itself.  Whether you see that as accidental or deliberate probably depends on how cynical you are about the whole issue.

Trans* Human Rights Bill C-16: A Look Back

Although I’ll be remarking on the passing of Bill C-16 elsewhere, I wanted to post Bill Siksay’s closing speech from February 7, 2011, back when the bill was in its third incarnation (of five), Bill C-389.  To me, it’s a profound moment to look back on, and realize just how far we’ve come.

It took 12 years to pass this bill.  For the first six, it was completely ignored, as was the trans* rights movement. Shortly after this speech, the bill did pass at Third Reading, and the effort finally was taken seriously… but was then very hard fought.  This speech was the moment (if there was any single one) that things changed.

I hope that Mr. Siksay’s efforts are remembered now.  Trans* people have usually been told to wait their turn, that legislation is incremental, that we should work for gay rights, and then the LGBTQ movement would come back for us.  This was a rare exception in which someone actually did come back.

Pitting “identity politics” against class struggle is backwards, and the path to self-defeat

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that one of the first things America’s political left would do during the 2016 election post-mortem is to attack minority groups like trans* people, and “identity politics.” That narrative says Americans decided a potential fascist (when you consider his policy proposals, unilateral rhetoric, media manipulation and stoking of hatred) was a better choice than a continuation of (stalemated) progressive politics, because the latter went too far by, for example, letting trans* folks in.

But it is worth digging down to see what is meant by “identity politics.” Like “political correctness,” it’s a conveniently vague term that can be used to complain about the politics of almost anyone whose struggles one hasn’t experienced firsthand. “Identity politics” is a code for all civil rights — for people of colour, for women, for LGBTQ folks, for immigrants, for Muslims struggling against the continual conflation with terrorists, and more. Beyond Colin Jost’s barbed joke on Saturday Night Live and a columnist in the New York Times, the most-cited instance of blowback was a statement by Bernie Sanders, that “It is not good enough for someone to say, I’m a woman, vote for me.” While perhaps true on the surface (though it seems intended with more nuance than it has been given by those who cite it), the inevitable inverse suggestion that minority groups were too greedy and / or impatient in trying to acquire equal rights risks being, in its way, yet another roundabout step toward white supremacy, whether conscious or not.

It is also looking at the situation entirely backwards. Do not fault people for wanting an equal chance. Fault the chances being sucked away from everyone. Equality is not an unreasonable demand, and nor is wanting it now.

On the contrary, a civil rights perspective is what has been needed. There have been significant flaws in how it has been implemented so far, however. Between the weakness of compromised politicians, the fears of ticking off corporate funders of the organizations and institutions that have taken the issue on, and the subjectivity of corporate-controlled media which either provide or squelch voices on the issue, civil rights only progress toward — but never reach — the point at which they address economic injustice. Meanwhile, privileged people within social movements have too often been satisfied with equality on paper, almost like a placebo, and willing to leave behind their poor and disenfranchised in order to get it.

This is against a backdrop in which economic disparity has stratified wealth — and it is only helped if everyone fights each other over the scraps rather than wondering where it has all gone. Four decades of “trickle down economics” have been more than enough to prove that wealth, instead, has only been bleeding upward.

Civil rights movements have been the right direction. But between opponents and the lack of will (or corporate indebtedness) of proponents, they have been sold out, left standing only partway to justice, among a population that has been allowed to believe that equality has already been accomplished… or is at least so inevitable that it does not require any further effort. Equality has only been permitted to the point where it has not been seen to jeopardize the wealth of the richest, at a time when the greed of the latter has been simultaneously sucking society dry universally.

At this moment, the worst thing the political left can do is to fracture and feed the impulse to blame each other for wanting “too much.” It is time to recognize that political and institutional powers have instead been only willing to offer too little, and to take it only from the less affluent (and in ways that were perfectly designed to sow resentment).

The left is weak because it has been fragmented, atomized, divided into pocket communities with single-issue visions. If it chooses to continue to do so in the face of possible looming fascism, then it is well along the path to self-defeat.

At one time, the left was galvanized by the ideas of unions, collective effort, and sharing the load / sharing the benefit. It is well past time for a call to question individualism and revisit an “everyone together” vision of progress.

Free speech, and the cruel shackles of empathy and mutual respect

In Canada, we tend to value freedom of speech very highly, and it’s often said that the best way to counter objectionable speech is with more speech.

That’s the first thought that crosses my mind in the case of U of T professor Jordan Peterson, who declares in a series of YouTube videos that he will not honour trans* peoples’ chosen pronouns, and opposes trans* human rights protections, all in the name of combating “political correctness.”

Of course, that would be an ideal world. In the real world, it’s still not that unusual for discussion of trans* issues to devolve into a “balanced” debate between pro- and anti-trans* academics over whether they exist at all, without any annoying context like actual trans* people being present to discuss their lived experience of, well, existing.  In the real world, there are real problems about who gets to speak, and how widely they can be heard… and the marginalized are often not given much voice to matters that affect — and are specifically about — them. In fact, the established and prolific voices in today’s media are more often quick to reject attempts to “inflict” change, or energetically create a lopsided portrait.

Speech is not a truly universal and equitable thing in the first place. Rather, it is something that is dependent upon access to favourable platforms, and is usually pre-emptively muddied by characteristic value judgments made about the speaker’s class, gender, race, etc.

Nevertheless, we strive for it as best we can. And in doing so, we arrive at the next irony: the very act of protesting ignorance with speech becomes itself heralded as evidence of censorship — as if the only way one’s speech can be truly free is for everyone else to remain silent.

The outcry and protest of ignorance [edit: example removed, was based on bad information – M] is speech, too — that of the protestors.  But in a disparate society, privileged speech is defended, while protest of it is often minimized, marginalized and dismissed as rowdiness, whinging, totalitarianism (!), censorship, and noise.  It becomes: “a little free speech for me, and a little shut-up-and-take-it for you.”

But let me back up for a moment.

Jordan Peterson is a University of Toronto (UofT) psychology professor who began his rants — especially about, but not limited to, trans* people and a “radical leftist ideology” — in late September, saying from the beginning that he felt he could face consequences, and even feared government or university reprisal because of existing human rights and hate speech laws.  He told Postmedia:

“I think (Bill C-16) risks criminalizing discussion about aspects of human sexual behaviour and identity that we need to discuss,” said Peterson, explaining that there are layers to C-16 — the biology of sex, gender identity and gender expression, for example — that could cause problems down the road.

One of his top stated concerns has been with the inclusion of trans* people in existing hate crimes legislation. The thing that people forget about this when it pertains to speech, though, is that the law has already been tested and shown to apply only exceedingly sparingly. If Bill Whatcott’s homemade but mass-distributed “anal warts” flyers equating LGBTQ people with pedophiles, and lyrical invitations to “kill the homosexual” skirt the edges of hate speech — some permissible and some not — then Peterson probably has nothing to worry about. Speech can indeed be hateful, and yet still not be legally actionable as hate speech.

But given that he seems only (or at least primarily) worried about human rights and hate crimes legislation when it pertains to LGBTQ people, one has to wonder if the concerns are cover for fears about the growing acceptance of trans* people in society.  He stated from the beginning that he will not use non-binary pronouns for other people, even if they request that.  He also said in his first video that he is “scared by the people behind the doctrines,” and attributes them to a radical Marxist ideology (reminiscent of the “cultural Marxism” panic making the rounds among social conservatives). He even compares the latter to Naziism, because of what he considers “murderous” and “Marxist” policies around the world.

Peterson frames his views in an academic and perhaps libertarian perspective, rather than a religious perspective, but he has been enjoying the support of religious conservatives.  This is probably because his views are quite compatible with the right-wing narrative that accepting and acknowledging trans* people as they need to live is (as enunciated regularly at LSN) a “disservice” and “false compassion because it’s not true.”

Peterson’s remedy to all of this dreaded political correctness — and what he calls upon listeners to help him with — is to propagate a “No PC” sticker campaign across the campus, and beyond.

The response to his videos has been mixed, with fierce supporters and opponents.  It has reportedly spawned threats, and affected some students’ class attendance.  In recent days, personal information about trans* students was circulated in far right subreddits, and protesters were nearly overwhelmed by an angry mob that allegedly included neo-Nazis.  This puts the University of Toronto in a quandary, as calls for reprisal — including possibly firing Peterson — have arisen.

From my perspective, reprisals like firing are not really a preferable end goal. We do value freedom of speech in Canada, after all — especially in academic settings — so there is that kernel of validity, even if Peterson’s speech is disrespectful or hateful. He’s entitled to his opinion, and also to be a jerk about it, on his own time.  Restrictions on freedom of speech are too often used to oppress minorities rather than people of privilege, anyway — much like the “homosexual propaganda” ban in Russia, which conservatives are still trying to figure out how to lobby for in North America.  It’s that extra step that Peterson wants to take it with students and colleagues which makes the question particularly difficult.

When I say this, though, it’s also partly because I’m an avid reader of social conservative media, and understand the undercurrent of persecution narrative activism. It’s why I can recognize what likely motivates someone who — without anyone ever asking him to respect trans* people in the first place — took it upon himself to loudly and energetically pursue free speech martyrdom anyway.

And personally, I see no value in giving it to him. Peterson’s actions — whether deliberately or by coincidence — are destined to place him in a growing collection of social conservatives who self-immolate for a few moments of anti-LGBTQ fame. It’s become trendy to seek a place on the Kim Davis speaking circuit, alongside Fundie cake bakers, and the twice-suspended Alabama Chief Justice who tried to singlehandedly overturn marriage equality in the United States.  Free speech martyrdom is also Ezra Levant’s entire schtick (which he’s still trying to parlay into a media network), so it also has just as valid and active a presence in Canada outside of overtly religious circles.  Whining that someone’s “special right” to dignity and equality is trampling your perfectly ordinary right to discriminate seems to make you a far right folk hero, these days. One of the end objectives of this, of course, is to insert a special religious exemption in human rights laws, so that people can practice their faith by refusing to sell to, hire, or otherwise co-exist with heathens (I might have got the precise wording wrong on this, because I don’t remember the particular scripture where Jesus commanded his followers to willfully disrespect and refuse to do business with sinners — I keep getting hung up on the “love one another” and “give unto Caesar” parts, for some reason).

Anyway, free speech martyrdom will allow Peterson to play hero… or at least until some other dupe comes along. After all, the whole value of the Kim Davises and Melissa Kleins to conservative activists only lasts as long as they’re useful to the two legal groups (Alliance Defending Freedom and Liberty Counsel) trying to etch anti-LGBTQ discrimination into American law, plus the allied think tanks, religious organizations and media outlets that are parasitically fundraising off both their successes and their failures. The Kleins, for example, recently closed their bakery, ruined because they thought that refusing to do business with a lesbian couple was a noble idea — and now they’re almost forgotten, except by the vaguely-phrased legend of the cake bakers. In that circuit, the fate of someone like Jordan Peterson is irrelevant.  The point of beatifying the speech martyrs is to entice more dupes into creating more situations that help build a narrative which frames LGBTQ peoples’ rights to live, work and do business as automatically and inherently persecuting to people of faith… something that Peterson’s firing would fit into just as beautifully as any technical victory he might (though it’s a longshot) find some way to score.

Either way, giving Peterson the glory he seems to seek really only feeds an ongoing anti-LGBTQ political tactic — even if deceptive — and gives it power.

Yet, there does have to be some form of limit. There’s no denying the destructive effect of cumulative aggressions and microaggressions. It’s one thing to be told by someone that they think you’re deluded and that they refuse to respect you. It’s quite another to be told that in billionuplicate, at every turn, by several people you don’t know (and even worse: some you do), without you ever having done anything to warrant the hostility. If you pay attention to news related to trans* people, you know that stories of suicides due to bullying and harassment arrive on a weekly basis… and that’s only the reported instances.

Because as valid as the need to protect free speech is, it is also very often weaponized, and used to gaslight entire communities that just want to be able to participate in society and be accorded the same dignity and respect as anyone else. It’s used to minimize them, tell them they ask too much, and shame them into going away — back into their closets would be just fine, for example. Remember what I said about free speech in the real world being often a one-sided or lopsided thing.

But where to draw the line on hateful speech is almost impossible to determine. It’s easy to limit speech in cases of libel and direct harassment or incitement. Cumulative hatefulness, though, is difficult to realistically pin on an individual, especially given that an individual doesn’t always intend the hostile fallout generated by their supporters or the like-minded. I don’t know that it can be done legislatively, except in extreme and / or intended instances.

What has to happen is a mass awakening, and a mass rejection of ignorance — and unfortunately, the pace of that kind of change is glacial. Of course, mass backlash will still be framed as persecution and censorship, but it will be better recognized widely as a reasoned response to bigotry.  And that takes time and awareness… and continual revisitation.

And if there is no clear legislative solution, then there’s not a lot of guidance outside the court system, either. So I understand the position this puts the University of Toronto (and potentially the Ontario Human Rights Commission, if it came to that) in… particularly with the issue of pronouns.

The thing to keep in mind about pronouns is that deliberately misgendering someone is itself an act of hostility — an act of asserting that you know better than someone else who they are, what they need and what their life experiences mean. It’s putting your inconvenience of having to adapt ahead of the reality of their entire lives. It’s not just about invalidating one’s choice of pronoun — it’s about claiming the right to authoritatively invalidate everything that they know about themself(/ves)*.

[* And if you paused for less than five seconds to look at that, understood it — however awkward that pronoun might have looked — shrugged and moved on, then congratulations: you’re far better able to cope with gender neutral and / or singular “they” pronouns than a UofT prof!]

Allowing Peterson to speak his opinions about “gender ideology” is one thing. Having him publicly vow to deliberately antagonize and disrespect students and other faculty members is quite another.  And as the increasing tensions and threats over the course of his campaign have shown, sustained, hateful free speech can have serious consequences.

So what is to be done?  The best scenario would be if Peterson would recognize where he has stepped beyond speech into deliberate antagonism and borderline incitement, maybe apologize, or at least leave things be, but that’s obviously not going to happen.  Probably, the only result that both he and trans* advocates and supporters will be satisfied with is some form of free speech martyrdom, in the form of firing or some lesser kind of censure.

And this will inevitably once more feed the conservative persecution complex, and the dreams of a Trump-like saviour to free them — in the words of the inimitable Samantha Bee — “from that prison, and the cruel shackles of empathy and mutual respect.”

(Crossposted to rabble.ca)

Conscience, Human Rights, and a Kentucky Clerk

So inevitably, a blog that’s all about religious freedom would need to comment on the ongoing troubles of Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, and her stand against issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.  I didn’t want to rush on that right away, because I wanted to do so thoughtfully, and dig underneath the impulsiveness and spin of both right- and left-wing media… and also add some context from the experience of a Canadian, living in a nation where marriage equality happened back in 2006 without a “Christian genocide” (I’ll discuss that sort of phrasing in a later post) occurring.

Because the “conflict between LGBT human rights and religious freedom” is actually remarkably un-complicated, when you drill down to the bottom of it.

First, the particulars.  Kim Davis is the elected (2014 — as a Democrat, ironically) clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky.  After the Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court ruling, she chose to defy a U.S. Federal Court order which required her to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.  Saying she was acting “under God’s authority,” she was jailed for contempt of court, on September 3rd and may face charges of official misconduct.

Here are some of the points that her legal team, Liberty Counsel, has made on her behalf:

“Davis only asked that the Kentucky marriage license forms be changed so her name would not appear on them. She would record any license without her name affixed. Marriage licenses remain in county records permanently. Davis said, “I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage. To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience.”

“Before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in Obergefell on June 26, 2015, 57 clerks, including Davis, wrote a letter to Kentucky legislators during the regular session, pleading with them to “get a bill on the floor to help protect clerks” who had a religious objection to authorizing the licenses. The Kentucky Clerks Association also recommend that the names of clerks be removed from the forms.

“… Kim Davis does not hate homosexuals or lesbians, as she explained: “I have no animosity toward anyone and harbor no ill will. To me this has never been a gay or lesbian issue. It is about marriage and God’s Word. It is a matter of religious liberty….”

“… The Supreme Court did not change Kentucky’s marriage law or its forms, but invalidated the legislation limiting marriage to opposite sex couples…”

There are a few other points at that link establishing her God credentials, and discussing her divorces, which in my opinion have been (perhaps fairly, but overblown) touted in media as showing her own hypocrisy.  Those points are irrelevant to the specific discussion here.

Liberty Counsel’s statements are a bit dubious.

Davis not only refused to sign and provide the licenses: a major part of the contempt ruling was because her deputies were not allowed to issue the licenses, either.  (Following Davis’ jailing, 5 of 6 subsequently have started issuing licenses, but without Davis’ signature)

Additionally (this is hinted at in one of the above points, but not made clear), the licenses may not be valid without her signature.  Davis has in fact argued that they are not.  Admittedly, this isn’t clear — a judge questioned about the discrepancy only remarked that couples getting licenses in Rowan County do so at their own risk — but it’s certainly likely that Liberty Counsel or another right-wing group would attempt to contest the legality of those licenses, at some point.  Either way, Davis is in essence demanding the right to deny all licenses from her county office, altogether, which goes beyond the jurisdiction of personal conscience.

There are nuances, and this is no exception.  I’ve touched on the first two, and there are also others:

• As mentioned above, she used her power to disallow her deputies to issue the licenses;
• Also mentioned above, it’s not simply a question of a refusal of a signature, but also an attempted refusal of legal standing of the licenses;
• Davis is a public employee, and responsible to all citizens of the State of Kentucky;
• As a public employee, she is subject to the legal principle of the separation of church and state;

But a crucial point, independent of all of the above, is probably that in any dispute centering on a conflict in rights, there should be at least some effort to accommodate.  All of the above assumes that LGBT human rights cannot be accommodated at all, without automatically invalidating the rights of Christians to live their faith.

But it’s not an either/or proposition.  There is a key flaw in the way this is framed.

In Canada, the conscience debate has had some instructive resolution in the medical field (although there are occasionally attempts to resurrect it).  Many provincial Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons across the country have some form of policy that allows medical professionals to decline to participate in processes that violate their conscience, provided that a timely referral is made and the patient is able to access the medical care they need, in a timely manner.  “Timely” is somewhat relative, and the rules don’t always work well (honestly, sometimes the process fails and care is denied or unreasonable obstacles are created), but it is at least a formal acknowledgement that there is a duty to accommodate, in a way that is relatively equitable for both parties.

What is instructive is that in Kim Davis’ very public demand for her right to freedom of religious conscience, this is not even a question.  The closest it ever came to being addressed at all was when some supporters claimed it’s a reasonable accommodation to require county residents to drive to a neighbouring county to obtain their licenses.  It’s not hard to recognize that that’s actually an undue hardship.

As someone who has advocated for trans* people and know how the Colleges’ policies fail in Canada, I don’t consider theirs an ideal solution.  However, the point is that there could be some form of middle ground, even if imperfect.  The State of Kentucky could amend their laws to ensure the validity of marriage licenses without Davis’ signature (to Davis’ credit, she does appear to have asked, and was ignored by legislators), and require that at least one person in the office be present besides herself who would be willing to issue them.  But among the far right, this isn’t even a discussion.  Among the far right, the objective is simply to have the right to deny licenses altogether, with no compromise being considered.

And that speaks volumes about Davis’ and supporters’ demands for religious freedom.

In closing, here’s a hint about what Davis’ supporters (and arguably perhaps puppetmasters) really feel about things:

“[Wallbuilders’ David] Barton, predictably, responded by asserting that Davis is entirely in the right to refuse to allow her office to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because “the Founding Fathers made it real clear that the laws of God are higher than the laws of man.”

“This is a law of God. Man’s law is not allowed to contradict God’s law,” Barton said, which means there can be no justification for jailing Davis because she is upholding God’s law…”

(From my sister blog, Today In Religious Freedom)

Indiana put the lie to “religious freedom.” But Canadian Evangelicals hope you didn’t notice.

Everyone’s familiar with the old adage, “be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.”

Which is why the Evangelical leaders who held a press conference on Parliament Hill calling for greater religious freedom laws and schmoozing with Conservative politicians last month might do well to remember Indiana.

“Unfortunately, Christians in this country find themselves under attack.  This is a violation, and we are calling on the Canadian government to stop this type of violation across this country…” — Charles McVety

Because almost to the day that the collection of Canadian religious leaders held a press conference at Parliament Hill, Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed a piece of legislation that was exactly the kind of thing they meant.  And it went over like plutonium-based paint.

For anyone who missed the ruckus it caused, the State of Indiana proposed a “religious freedom” law that was very similar to those existing in other U.S. states and federally — except that by the omission of a small phrase, it essentially made it illegal for any government body to intervene in cases of discrimination, provided said discrimination was motivated by a person’s religious freedom of conscience.  Put simply, it would legally sanction religiously-motivated discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* (LGBT) people (and for that matter, just about anyone else), while making it illegal for any government body to intervene.  And the State of Indiana did so because of an outcry from religious groups struggling against marriage equality (with no shortage of drama) claiming that legally protecting LGBT people from discrimination is tyranny:

“This is tyranny, and it has not come to the United States from an invading nation with tanks and rockets.  It has come wrapped in a hijacked-rainbow flag, under the banner of “diversity” and “nondiscrimination.”  At this point, only the most uninformed and deceived among us cannot see that the radical homosexual movement—a movement based purely on lies and sin—has at its heart the wicked goal of tyranny over Christian freedom, expression and conscience.  Don’t doubt it.  While this particular case does not necessarily involve a Christian employer, ultimately Christians and Christianity are the true targets of this hell-born movement.  But, these activists will gladly target anyone who resists their dark agenda, as this company, Tower Loan, is sadly discovering.

“The culture in our nation today is steeped in immorality and moral relativism to the point that far too many people have no perception of the grotesque reality of homosexual behavior and how the activists and their supporters in this sexual anarchy movement are using sodomy and “transgenderism” as a foundation to create new “rights” for those who engage in these base behaviors.  These new “civil rights” for sodomites are for the purpose of destroying the rights of the majority of the American people…”

The State of Arizona had attempted a similar thing last year, until people started realizing that it might allow medical professionals who were Jehovah’s Witnesses to deny patients blood transfusions, and other unpredictable consequences.  Moreover, the clear intention had been to disenfranchise and target a specific group of people, which proved not a very popular idea with the commercial sector.  Boycotts were threatened and travel to the state was likely to become embargoed in places, while the law’s proponents demonstrated just how aggressively they intended to use the law (while still denying that it constituted a form of special rights).  Arizona backed off, and the Governor refused to sign the bill.

In Indiana, though, Governor Pence did so happily, with a smile, a flourish, and a special fringe group photo-op.

The backlash was instantaneous.  Several states and local governments banned the use of taxpayer money to fund city employees’ travel to the State.  Celebrities canceled shows and declared a boycott.  NASCAR, the NFL and other sporting figures put pressure on the State.  The Gap, Twitter, Apple, Angie’s List and several other companies spoke out with condemnation.  Ten religious groups decried the law, including the Disciples of Christ, which threatened to move its annual convention.  The Indianapolis Star published a front page with the top half black, and bearing the words, “Fix This Now.”  And the Indiana-based NCAA made it known that they were questioning whether to hold the long-awaited Final Four tournament in Indianapolis, if not make greater changes in the future.  Eventually, the State amended the law to remove the freedom to discriminate portion (although notably, Indiana still does not actually have state-wide LGBT human rights protections, so the issue is actually not over, even if the state government wants to sweep it under the rug).  Other states have had mixed reactions to the spectacle, however, and groups and individuals have taken a certain amount of inspiration from Indiana’s trial run:

“In an interview with WOOD-TV, Dieseltec owner Brian Klawiter said he is a Christian and that he doesn’t ask his customers if they are gay, but “If you want to come in here with your boyfriend and you want to openly display that, that’s just not going to be tolerated here. We don’t believe that here.”

“In the rant, posted on Tuesday, Klawiter lamented the discrimination white heterosexual Christians face everyday in the U.S. and said he is no longer going to take it…”

To be fair, the March 25th delegation of Evangelicals didn’t call upon Prime Minister Stephen Harper for an Indiana-style “religious freedom” law per-se.  By the time they got to the Hill, in fact, they’d figured out that all of their complaints were in jurisdictions outside federal control.  So they asked for a statement.

And they didn’t get it.  Instead, they came away with a lone MP who left the Conservative caucus and used the opportunity to give a weird rant in Parliament about scientists being “gagged over a false construct related to the theory of evolution.”  Not the wisest way to politically self-immolate, I suppose.

“There’s a whole generation of kids being taught that what they’re taught in Sunday School or in church is garbage, it’s wrong, it’s false, and it’s simply a form of bullying that’s no longer acceptable. It’s not scientifically tenable, it’s a disservice to science… it’s not freedom of religion if your views are put down by your peers.” — MP James Lunney

But it’s not the first time that ideological groups have called for religious-based special rights, and it’s certainly not going to be the last.  If anything, the effort seems poised to grow.  In the U.S., some states are pressing forward with new bills of the sort, while more than one Republican Presidential contender has vowed to make it a priority.  The view from the American side of the border, at least, is that LGBT acceptance and Christianity are simply incompatible:

“When two diametrically opposed and incompatible value systems (namely Christianity and hedonistic humanism) come together in the same place, there can be no peaceful coexistence.  One will necessarily dominate, while the other is necessarily subjugated.  We saw that quickly happen in Indiana last week.” — BarbWire commentator Bob Ellis

(It’s worth adding a reminder that I personally try not to use “Christian” to describe these folks, despite their rallying behind the term, because I consider it questionable whether they actually are… at least when it comes to “loving one another” by trying to disenfranchise, invalidate, and occasionally even still criminalize people whose existence they deny or object to… not to mention doing things like conflating entire groups with sexual predators as a political tactic.)

In Canada, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are tiptoeing around Indiana while strategizing further… and recognizing that their fight is a little harder in a nation that has already had marriage equality for several years and somehow managed to cope.

“… The most significant part of the HMP [“Homosexual Ministry of Propaganda”] victory is that the word “Equality”, a word twisted by the HMP to squash dissent, has once more been reinforced in the minds of the public to mean that a male + male or a female + female = marriage…” — Peter Baklinski at the Canadian website, LifeSiteNews.

The old “special rights” argument, now with actual special rights added.

The “religious freedom” tactic isn’t really all that new: only the phrasing used to convey it.  For many years, religious groups complained that extending human rights protections to LGBT people would confer “special rights” upon them.  Lest readers doubt that there was some deliberate co-ordination to all of this, Media Matters provides an in-depth look:

“Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal organization that works with 2,400 allied attorneys nationally on a $39 million (as of 2013) annual budget. ADF was founded in 1994 by several of the country’s largest national evangelical Christian ministries to “press the case for religious liberty issues in the nation’s courts” and “fend-off growing efforts by groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which seek to immobilize Christians.” Today, it has become the country’s best-funded and most powerful right-wing Christian group working against what the organization calls the “myth of the so-called ‘separation of church and state.'” 

“… While the group prefers to talk about its “religious liberty” work when in the media spotlight, ADF also actively works internationally to promote and defend laws that criminalize gay sex. ADF’s formal support for anti-sodomy legislation dates to at least 2003, before the Supreme Court made its landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas. ADF, which was at the time still known as the Alliance Defense Fund, filed an amicus brief in the case, defending state laws criminalizing gay sex. In its brief, ADF spent nearly 30 pages arguing that gay sex is unhealthy, harmful, and a public health risk…”

Of course, it then became awkward trying to explain the dangers that could ensue if the “special right” to be equal might trump the then- perfectly ordinary everyday right to deny someone employment, housing, medical care, enfranchisement, and/or goods and services.  Embarassed, anti-LGBT leaders began looking for new phrasing and the lowest-hanging fruit to justify their claims.  The shift to a “religious persecution” -based tactic started with adoption agencies that were “forced to close” because they refused to assist would-be parents in gay or lesbian relationships.  Except that they weren’t really forced to shut down:

“Catholic Charities in Illinois has served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state’s social service network for poor and neglected children. But now most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in Illinois are closing down rather than comply with a new requirement that says they can no longer receive state money if they turn away same-sex couples as potential foster care and adoptive parents…

That’s when the attention turned to wedding cakes and photographers.  To at least some of the public, it seems relatively trivial and nit-picky that LGBT people are expecting to be able to enjoy the same access to those services as anyone else.  Never mind that the same logic and law used to deny a wedding cake might also be used to deny housing, education, health care, security, or any other service where religious freedom of conscience might cause someone to take issue.

Canada illustrates this a bit more visibly, with religious conservatives fighting a conscience policy for medical professionals which would allow them to decline non-emergency as long as they still provide a referral to someone who will provide accurate information.  Shoulda’ went for the cakes.  Just saying.

I’ll admit that there’s a civil libertarian in me who wonders why someone would take it upon themselves to fret about anti-LGBT cake vendors, or even go looking for them for the sake of stirring up a controversy.  I just don’t see the point of wanting to give homophobes and transphobes a bunch of money.  But I get it: full enfranchisement hasn’t happened until a person can go about their business without having to worry about being blindsided by idiots trying to exclude them, just because of who they are.  And that’s why the trivial stuff matters.

But in the end, while the dust settles on Indiana’s religious freedom bill fiasco, and Canadian ideologues try to raise the issue to a national level, it’s important to look at the fallout.  Because as much as religious fundamentalists might try to pretend that they’re only interested in protecting their own freedoms and not harming others, the meltdowns that have occurred in the wake of the Indiana bill’s demise paint a different picture:

“It wasn’t broken and the alleged “fix” that the Indiana legislature, at your request, has proposed to the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), will destroy the law beyond all recognition. In fact, it will turn it into the “RFDA” – the “Religious Freedom Destruction Act.” No bill at all would have been better than this anti-Christian, sexual anarchist disaster.

“What was intended as a shield to every American’s First Amendment-guaranteed religious liberty, as proposed, will now become a sword used to destroy it. What was designed to defend people of faith against being discriminated against and bullied will, instead, codify anti-religious discrimination and bullying into law. It will unconstitutionally force people of faith, under penalty of law, to affirmatively violate their sincerely held religious conscience. It has been turned into a weapon that compels people of faith to disobey God or face government sanction.” — Matt Barber

Because the intent was clearly to discriminate.  And sometimes when anti-LGBT leaders think that only the faithful are listening, they’ll even candidly say so:

“Starting in the 1990s, the homosexual movement worked tirelessly, spending enormous funds, to get state and local governments to amend their anti-discrimination laws covering public accommodations, employment, housing, public education, etc., to include “sexual orientation.” In recent years there’s been a push to include “gender identity” (cross-dressing, transgenderism, transsexuality) also.

“There’s a big strategic reason for that. As Dr. Scott Lively has pointed out for years, these updated laws are the starting point for the whole, brutal legal jihad against Christians and others holding traditional values. Every outrage we’re now seeing — including the LGBT activism in the schools, targeting of businesses, men using women’s restrooms, sado-masochist/”swinger” conventions in hotels, etc. — emanates from these laws.

“But pro-family people have only recently started to wake up on this. They instinctively realize that citizens should be able to discriminate and refuse to promote or celebrate perversion and “gay”  marriage. But these anti-discrimination laws now make it a crime to do so…”

The fight for special rights to discriminate will continue — it’ll just change along the way.  It will persist because the will to discriminate persists:

“What should Christians and other believers do in the face of this heightening repression? They must go on the offensive—charitably but vigorously—and fight the battle on several levels… The lame discrimination complaints by homosexualist organizations against believers in human rights commissions and the pressuring of corporations to dump executives and employees who dissent at all from the homosexualist agenda should should be met consistently with lawsuits for abuse of process and defamation. That would put financial pressure on the well-heeled homosexualist organizations…” — Crisis Magazine & LifeSiteNews commentary.

So the strategizing continues.  In one American twist, anti-discrimination intervention is being said to be a violation of the separation of church and state.  In another, an organization that considers boycotts and letter-writing campaigns organized by LGBT groups to be “economic terrorism” is exercising its own boycotts and letter-writing campaigns against alleged “anti-Christian discrimination” — discrimination which apparently includes producing a TV show about the life of Dan Savage.  The hypocrisy is rampant, with the same groups that complain of being silenced having no qualms about censoring LGBT speakers or hounding them to leave their jobs with non-profit organizations.  In a moment of coinciding interest opportunism, American lobbyists and legislators are even hoping that religious freedom bills can be combined with the ruling in Hobby Lobby to grant companies the same sort of special rights:

“Georgia State Senator McKoon hopes that, if his bill passes next year, courts will find it covers companies as well as flesh-and-blood human beings, even if it doesn’t say so explicitly in the text. “I believe,” he says, “that the bill would be read as the federal bill was interpreted by the Hobby Lobby decision…”

It’s not going to drop off the Canadian radar anytime soon either, because the Supreme Court of Canada just ruled that reciting a denominational prayer at town council meetings infringes on the freedom of conscience and religion. The state, it determined, should neither favour nor hinder any particular belief, nor impose one on others.  Which, when viewed through the far-right lens means that the rival religion of secularism / atheism is persecuting Christians:

“In a sense, by prohibiting respectful, non-proselytizing, non-coercive prayer, the court is showing a clear preference to non-religious believers over religious believers, and gives an untenable status to secularism and atheism, which are themselves beliefs. So there is no balance and no reconciliation among various beliefs in this ruling but shows a preference for one belief – secularism – over all other beliefs,” Elia told LifeSiteNews.

“This is not an example of a true, authentic and robust pluralism,” Elia stressed. “In true pluralism, religious believers and non-believers can share the public square, but this decision means the public square can no longer be shared…” — LifeSiteNews.

So it becomes worth scrutinizing the recent events the Canadian delegation to Parliament pointed to as examples of attacks on religious freedoms in Canada:

• The decisions of a number of provincial bar associations not to accredit any potential law school graduate of Trinity Western University;
• The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario’s Professional Obligations and Human Rights policy, which ensures access to medical care for people seeking abortions, contraception or other accepted legal medical procedures; and
• A recent Statement of Support for Diversity and Inclusion signed by 72 major companies across Canada.

Because when we do so, we see that:

• The decision not to accredit Trinity Western University law school graduates was made because of TWU’s ban on sexual behaviour outside heterosexual marriage, which amounts to a creative way to shut out LGBT people;
• The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario’s policy in fact allows medical professionals to opt out of procedures and services that violate their religious beliefs, but they must still provide a referral to someone who will give accurate information about treatment or procedure options (which gets portrayed in far right media as forcing doctors to perform abortions); and
• Seriously, this is a statement that says “We value the range of perspectives, ideas and experiences that diversity provides, whether grounded in gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, cultural background, religion or age,” and says that the signatory businesses will “encourage greater diversity and inclusion.”

Underneath it all, the special right being sought is the right to create deliberate barriers for people whose sexuality they object to.  Even diversity policies are considered offensive:

“Gwen Landolt, a lawyer and national vice-president of Real Women of Canada, called BMO’s policy the “height of discrimination and intolerance.”

“Their position is shocking and appalling. They have applied political correctness to the absolute borderline of insanity,” she told LifeSiteNews…”

But don’t expect an equanimous approach to how “religious freedom” is interpreted.  At best, it is a selective thing:

Lunney’s defence of religious freedom does not extend to supporting the right of Muslim women to wear the niqab when being sworn in as citizens, however.

After initially avoiding the question, he eventually confirmed that he shares the views of his former party and the prime minister that those seeking to become Canadian citizens should show their faces.

“I’m not going to get tangled up in that argument,” he said.

In the end, of course, the “religious freedom” battle cry may end up amounting to nothing in the warmer social climate of Canada.  Hopefully, the general public will see it for what it is, without the benefit of a Mike Pence -like Premier to push the issue.

“Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall says the opening prayer at the province’s legislature will remain despite a recent Supreme Court ruling…”

But then again, who knows?