Biden To Roll Back Safeguards for Student Religious Groups on Campus
The Biden administration’s plan to repeal a key religious liberties protection for college students could launch an epic struggle aimed at the Supreme Court over whether religious groups on campus can restrict leadership positions to students who follow the groups’ religious tenets.
At issue is an effort to force student religious groups to open leadership positions to “all-comers” — say, an abortion-rights activist as leader of a Catholic student group or a polytheist as leader of an Orthodox Jewish club. The Biden administration wants to appeal protections, known as the “Religious Liberty and Free Inquiry Rule,” established by the Trump administration in 2020.
The question of First Amendment protections for religious student groups first came to a head in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of “all-comers” in a case out of the Hastings School of Law in California. The vote, though, was five to four, with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia dissenting in favor of religious students.
The Nine ruled that the university had the right to deny student organization status and privileges to a Christian group.
Since then, though, the makeup of the Supreme Court has changed dramatically, with a six-to-three majority that favors stronger religious freedom rights.
In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, UC Hastings said it had an “all-comers” policy that required all official student groups to accept any willing participant as a member or leader.
UC Hastings said the legal society was ineligible for official school sanction because its statement of faith — required for all members to affirm — upheld traditional Christian teachings on marriage and sexuality, which the school said violated its non-discrimination policy.
In the majority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the school’s “all-comers” policy was “a reasonable, viewpoint neutral condition” that did not violate the First Amendment. The Christian Legal Society could exist as an unofficial group on campus, the court ruled, but the school was within its rights to deny its status as a registered student organization.
In 2020, the Trump administration sought to bolster federal support for religious student groups facing similar pressures through the Free Inquiry Rule, tying federal funding to protections for religious student groups.
According to these regulations, “students are allowed to say that they only want to have leaders of their student groups who are practicing members of their faith on campus,” the general counsel for the Jewish Coalition on Religious Liberties, Howard Slugh, says.
“Religious student organizations should be able to enjoy the benefits, rights, and privileges afforded to other student organizations at a public institution,” the Trump-era regulations say. “Accordingly, public institutions cannot exclude religious student organizations from receiving neutral and generally available government benefits.”
The Free Inquiry rule in its current iteration allows schools to maintain all-comers policies but notes that schools “may not selectively enforce” policies to target religious student organizations. Political groups would need to accept students who may not align with their missions.
“With respect to a true all-comers policy, pro-choice groups could not bar leader positions from pro-life individuals,” the final rule said, raising the question whether a true all-comers policy is possible. Mission-driven organizations are likely always to select mission-aligned leaders.
On Tuesday, though, the Department of Education announced its intention to open comments on a proposed amendment to the regulation, one that would strip its power to condition funds on the basis of protections for religious student groups.
The Biden administration says these rules are “not necessary” for the protection of First Amendment rights and have “caused confusion” for schools — particularly at the intersection of religious liberties protections and anti-discrimination policy.
The administration noted concerns that the Free Inquiry Rule could mandate “preferential treatment to religious student groups” and “allow religious student groups to discriminate against vulnerable and marginalized students.”
The Department of Education said it was “unduly burdensome” to be involved in investigations about the treatment of religious student organizations and wants to hand these cases back over to the judicial branch.
“Where complex questions over the First Amendment arise, Federal and State courts are best equipped to resolve these matters,” the administration said in its announcement. “In its proposed rule, the Department is proposing to return to this longstanding practice of deferring to courts.”
Should the question reach Supreme Court again, the nation could see the precedent established by Christian Legal Society overturned, given the court’s more conservative leanings — especially at the intersection of religious liberty and education.
The move to overturn protections for religious student groups in higher education comes as the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit prepares to hear a case en banc on the topic at the high school level, Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. San Jose Unified School District.
At a California public school, a Christian athletic group was stripped of its official club status because its student leaders were required to affirm certain principles of faith — including traditional Christian teachings on marriage and sexuality. The case represents an opportunity to relitigate nearly the same principles at stake in Christian Legal Society.
Oral arguments will take place next month
****************************************************
Fox News’s ‘silent ban’ on Donald Trump
It’s by now well-established that Fox News, the American media behemoth, is no longer on the Trump Train. Trumpworld’s union with Foxworld was never altogether easy and, ever since that fateful election in November 2020, it has fallen apart. Trumpists despise Fox for, as many see it, helping Joe Biden steal the election. And the top brass at Fox News have sought to distance themselves from the Trump movement and what they regard as its increasingly toxic politics. Rupert Murdoch has had enough of the Orange One, by all accounts.
What hasn’t been made entirely clear is the extent of the break-up. One senior Fox figure has let slip, however, that Donald Trump is effectively ‘banned’ from appearing on Fox News at present. He hasn’t been seen on the main channel since he declared his candidacy for the 2024 presidential in November and other Fox sources have confirmed that there’s a reason Donald is not appearing on their network.
A source familiar with Fox insisted that ‘the network would never apply a ban on any presidential candidate’. No doubt that is true.
But, as another source with deep contacts inside the company put it: ‘Fox News digital will write about Trump and give him little phone interviews. But he has not been on the actual channel since he announced. Rupert doesn’t want him to win.’
Other American media insiders say it’s a not very well-kept secret that Fox won’t have Trump on anymore. ‘Everybody knows you just can’t say it out loud,’ said one.
The wider Murdoch empire is showing favour to the Republican hopefuls hoping to beat Trump in the 2024 primaries. The New York Post, Murdoch’s leading American tabloid, has been notably positive in its coverage of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Along with Murdoch’s other big US paper, The Wall Street Journal, the Post has made its editorial line clear: it’s time for the party to move on.
But DeSantis, the just-declared Nikki Haley and even the gonzo newbie runner, Vivek Ramaswamy, have all appeared on Fox in recent weeks. But the Donald remains persona non grata.
Trumpworld is seething with their sense of being snubbed. ‘There is definitely a soft or silent ban on Trump,’ says a source close to Trump. ‘They have clearly gone all in for Ron DeSantis, judging by their fawning coverage of his events week.’
Trump echoed the sentiment this week on his Truth Social Platform, as he said:
So interesting to watch FoxNews cover the small and unenthusiastic 139 person crowd in Staten Island for DeSantis, but stay as far away as possible from coverage of the thousands of people, many unable to get in, at the Club 47 event in West Palm Beach, Florida. I call FoxNews the RINO Network, and their DOWN BIG Ratings accurately reflect the name.
But there is no denying that Trump’s invisibility on Fox represents a significant obstacle to his re-election: it is still easily the nation’s most-watched cable news network.
Media eco-systems are always changing, of course, and right-wing channels, such as Newsmax and OAN, have prospered since 2020. But Fox is the biggest beast in conservative media – a fact that the MAGA movement can’t change.
The Trump ban is not formal policy, of course, more an understanding between senior people at the network that Trump is not somebody they should be booking. But, with the 2024 election starting to take shape, and Trump still easily the frontrunner for the nomination according to most serious polls, how long can Fox afford to freeze him out? ‘They have to be careful,’ says another source close to Trump. ‘They are the most important network on the conservative side, but it’s not their job to be too obviously picking the Republican nominee. People don’t like that.’
Many of Fox’s biggest stars, including their most-watched hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, have often interviewed Trump in the past and have by no means switched their editorial line to favour DeSantis. As one regular Fox guest who is close to the 45th President put it, ‘I’m pretty sure that if one of the big guys, like Hannity, say, said ‘F*** you I’m putting Trump on, nobody would stop them.’ But the fact remains that Trump hasn’t appeared on Fox since November, which suggests the anti-Trump forces are holding sway. “It’s all the mid-level guys who are terrified of losing their jobs who don’t want to upset Murdochs,’ says a Trumpworld source. ‘But if they obviously bash Trump, they get roasted by his fans, many of whom are Fox viewers, on social media. They went quite anti-Trump after the election and their ratings tanked.’
There’s a long way to go. It’s worth remembering that Murdoch is nothing if not adaptable when it comes to siding with the winning ticket. In 2016, as it became obvious that Trump would win the Republican nomination, Fox quickly became his biggest cheerleader. Trump and Murdoch, two billionaires with quite a bit in common, had some kind of relationship, back then. Today, not so much.https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/fox-newss-silent-ban-on-donald-trump
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/fox-newss-silent-ban-on-donald-trump
****************************************************Vimeo Removes ‘Affirmation Generation’ Documentary Revealing the Medical Scandal of Transgenderism
The video platform Vimeo locked the account hosting the documentary “Affirmation Generation,” a film exposing the medical scandal of experimental transgender interventions.
“Our film represents that which is currently being silenced because it’s unpopular with the tenets of the mainstream media,” Joey Brite, the film’s executive producer, told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday. “First, it was the author J.K. Rowling followed by comedian Dave Chappelle. Vimeo and other platforms have banned many such projects as ours based on newly constructed hateful narratives that cast truth, science and common sense as enemies of the State. We need to move towards conversation and stop fomenting the conflict.”
“This is an issue of free speech and Big Tech removing it from American citizens. Is THIS the America we want to live in?” Brite asked.
Vera Lindner, the film’s producer, sent The Daily Signal a photo of Vimeo’s announcement that the documentary’s account “has been disabled due to a violation of Vimeo’s Terms of Service and/or Guidelines.”
The film had been up for three days and had racked up 19,000 views in that time, Brite said.
“The filmmakers of AFFIRMATION GENERATION – all lifelong West Coast Liberal Democrats, parents and community leaders – made an extraordinary effort to cite peer-reviewed medical research and evidence, to present the issue with deep compassion toward the gender-dysphoric youth, and to back up every argument in the film with science,” the filmmakers said in a statement. “AFFIRMATION GENERATION is the first non-ideological, non-religious documentary focused on the impact of transgender medical practices for youth. Censorship of dissenting voices is incompatible with democratic values, and especially with diversity and inclusion.”
Vimeo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Brite told The Daily Signal that the filmmakers “expected to get kicked off of Vimeo because of what happened to Dead Name,” a documentary about the parents who struggle when school staff and doctors push experimental medical transitions for their children. “Dead Name” has not been restored to the platform.
Brite also said she posted videos of a large gender-critical conference she hosted in August 2020, and Vimeo removed those videos five months after she posted them.
Brite, a lesbian, said she first witnessed people offering testosterone near lesbian bars in California in the 1990s. She said the “T” in the LGBT acronym “was a Trojan horse.”
“This is all about money, Big Pharma,” she said. “This is just like the opioid crisis except that it is global, and embedded in governments, education, law.”
She said the film features the stories of six detransitioners, interviews with twelve experts, including clinicians, and the findings of over 45 peer-reviewed scientific studies and journal articles in order to expose the medical scandal of the transgender interventions.
Brite criticized the suggestion that transgender identify affirms a person’s “authentic self.”
“Your ‘authentic self’ is now happening through drugs, sterilization, possible surgeries that are all experimental, all in mind with changing to this amorphous thing called gender, which is a social construct, not biology,” she said.
Linder told The Daily Signal that she hopes Vimeo’s ban will have the “Streisand Effect,” the phenomenon whereby banning something actually draws more attention to it.
She said the film has not found an alternate hosting platform because the filmmakers aim to get it distributed more widely.
“Currently we are contacting big distributors for worldwide distribution,” Lindner explained. “For this reason, we will not put the film on alternate platforms as that would preclude Distributors from wanting to pick it up. Instead, we will continue to email it to our focus groups (parents, doctors, gay/lesbian advocates).”
“If fans post it on alternate platforms, these would be bootlegged versions,” she added. “I hope they would not preclude Distributors from considering our film. The Social Media accounts for Affirmation Generation will always have a link where people can see it.”
*************************************************
The ‘Great Awokening’ Is Transforming Science and Medicine
The “great awokening” touches every elite institution in America, mostly radiating out from our compromised system of higher education. One of the most disturbing and illuminating aspects of this cultural revolution is how much it is transforming science and medicine.
A video of medical students at Columbia University reciting an updated version of the Hippocratic oath that injected elements of critical race theory made the rounds on social media recently. As many have noted, this “student-led initiative” sounds cult-like.
Fox News reported that “the August 2021 ceremony was the first time in the medical school’s 255-year history that the incoming medical students recited their personalized class oath, a spin on the Hippocratic Oath to ‘better reflect the values [students] wish to uphold as they enter their medical training.’”
“We enter the profession of medicine with appreciation for the opportunity to build on the scientific and humanistic achievements of the past,” the oath begins. “We also recognize the acts and systems of oppression effected in the name of medicine. We take this oath of service to begin building a future grounded in truth, restoration, and equity to fulfill medicine’s capacity to liberate.”
All I can say is if you have serious health problems, I suggest looking for an older doctor.
This effort to transform even the most elite institutions of science and medicine into temples of wokeness isn’t just being led by a few radical students. It’s part of a widespread and, yes, systemic effort to convert elite institutions into revolutionary political organizations.
A recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine highlights how our most prestigious research and medical institutions are being transformed into engines of fanatical wokeness.
“Calls for the National Academies to pursue such a report had been building for years, the authors write, but took off after the murder of George Floyd and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests in 2020,” Stat News reported. “The authors note that they first started with a literature review ‘to illuminate how historical policies, practices, and laws can have lasting effects’ and note that they use the term racism ‘because it is scientifically accurate … even if it makes readers uncomfortable.’”
The National Academies report doesn’t specifically cite critical race theory or the works of Ibram X. Kendi—the leading public proponent of “anti-racism”—but it clearly relies on a similar network of ideas.
The central premise of this ideology is that the United States and Western societies in general were founded in racism, that their basic institutions inculcate white supremacy, and that racial disparities in nearly any profession or societal outcome proves that structural racism exists. Therefore, it dodges the need to prove individual or literal acts of racism and instead pins the discrepancy of outcomes on “unconscious bias” and other structural barriers.
To correct what is defined as a “systemic problem,” Kendi and the National Academies suggest anti-racism, which often actually means racial discrimination against whites and Asians in the name of equity.
“Racial disparities in [science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine] careers do not rest on individual deficiency in candidates or even primarily on the individual racism of institutional and organizational gatekeepers,” the National Academies report says in its preface. “Racism is embedded in our society.”
Even the mushrooming number of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that are taking over higher education aren’t enough, according to the authors of the report.
“It is incumbent upon organizations and institutions to address racial biases that individual decisionmakers are unlikely to notice, identify, or prioritize because, as evidence shows, they may not recognize how their own, perhaps inadvertent, individual decisions contribute to overall patterns,” the report says.
Got it? The ways of systemic racism are so obscure and mysterious that we need a class of hyper-dedicated inquisitors who can read the tea leaves and stamp out racist heresies. Science be praised.
Notice how seamlessly—and ludicrously—ideology has been wedded to science and medicine—fields once thought to be objective and removed from cultural debates.
Remember the whole “the real pandemic is racism” stuff that was used to justify lifting COVID-19 restrictions for Black Lives Matter protests and creating race-based medical treatment programs? That’s the mentality that dominates elite institutions and continues to accelerate.
Gutting actual science, wearing it as a skin suit, and yelling that this is “scientifically accurate” doesn’t make it so. Instead, our society’s revolutionary vanguard relies on institutional bureaucratic power to simply overcome any opposition to their political designs.
This is the crisis that looms over all other political debate in America.
What kind of country will we live in if this continues to be the guiding ideology of every serious institution? We won’t be a serious country. Eventually, the incredible advances we’ve made in science, technology, and medicine will fall into ruin. We will become a society in which opportunities for advancement and “success” rely on historic grievance and arcane knowledge of a rapidly evolving ideology.
The Soviet Union tried something like that. It didn’t end well.
That’s why we need to use the power we have now to reverse this institutional takeover while enough Americans still have the common sense to understand just how pernicious it is.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/02/21/the-great-awokening-is-transforming-science-and-medicine
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
/>
Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
No comments:
Post a Comment