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High Schools Are the Next Battleground in the Fight Over Transgender Athletes

by HelenaZ016730995 Posted on September 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Robby Dyas didn’t play very much as a freshman on Lincoln High School’s softball team. The shortstop got a concussion from a pop fly early in the season, and spent the following weeks learning “a lot about the strategic side” of the game from the bench. After that, Dyas was done with softball.

The Nebraskan teen was also done being a girl: Junior year, Dyas came out as transgender and began using male pronouns and the name Robby. But the longtime athlete—who’d competed in taekwondo, basketball, wrestling, and softball as a kid—never got to pitch overhand. “I just remember getting a rude comment about girls playing on the baseball team,” he recalls.

This year, transgender teens may have a better shot at high school sports in Nebraska: The state’s new policy allows trans girls and boys to compete on teams corresponding with their gender preference. But before they can do that, they’ll have to prove to a four-member Gender Identity Eligibility Committee that they’re “consistently” transgender. Trans girls, who are born male but identify as female, will have to undergo sex reassignment surgery or a year of hormone therapy to play.

Nearly 40 states have adopted policies for high school transgender athletes. Some allow students to play on teams based on gender identity, without any kind of hormone requirement, while others restrict them to teams matching the sex on their birth certificates. Nebraska’s policy takes a middle road—and has fueled outrage on all sides. It also comes at a time of national debate over trans rights in schools. Nearly half of all states are currently suing the Obama administration over whether Title IX, a law that prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded schools, should protect trans kids, too. While that legal battle centers on questions of bathroom access, experts say it could also affect athletic participation.

In the crosshairs will be kids like Robby Dyas and Asher Wells, another trans boy at Lincoln High. Wells takes gym classes during summer school instead of the regular academic year so he can avoid the girls’ locker room. When I first spoke to him, he was pondering whether to try out for the boy’s tennis team before he graduates.

It might be simpler if Asher were just a few years older. In college, the aspiring tennis player would probably get to choose whether to try out for the men’s team or the women’s team, without having to brave any gender committees; that’s because the NCAA, which makes rules for college sports at universities around the country, came up with a policy for trans athletes back in 2011. Trans men who take testosterone—to appear more masculine—can only play on men’s teams, since the hormone has been linked with muscle mass. Those like Asher, who aren’t taking testosterone, can play on whichever team they prefer. And trans women, born with male bodies, need to medically suppress their natural testosterone levels if they want to compete against other women. (In January, the International Olympic Committee updated its policy to include similar regulations.)

At first, many high schools followed the NCAA’s lead. Some hadn’t given much thought to creating their own policies, because until recently they “really hadn’t had a lot of kids come up through the school ranks identifying as transgender,” notes Karissa Niehoff, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Schools, whose policy for trans athletes once mirrored the college guidelines. Then her association, like some in other states, changed its tune, perhaps realizing that college and high school sports aren’t the same—different ages, different goals. Connecticut ditched its hormone-based policy in 2013 and adopted more inclusive rules, allowing kids to play based on their self-identification as male or female.

Pat Griffin, a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who helped develop the NCAA’s hormone-based policy, supports that kind of move. High schoolers shouldn’t have to take hormones, she says, because at that age, “most students are playing to participate.”

But absent a national governing body, high school guidelines vary widely. In Texas, a new rule prohibits students across the state from participating on teams that don’t match up with the sex on their birth certificates. On the other hand, in 2013 California became the first state to pass a law allowing trans students to play on teams matching their gender identity, no hormone therapy required; about 15 states now have similar policies. A handful of other states require trans girls to take hormones for a year before playing on girls’ teams. (See map below.)

Chris Mosier/TransAthlete.com

In Nebraska, the school athletics association had never been able to pass an athletic policy for gender-nonconforming kids, in part due to the state’s deeply conservative roots. Then in 2015, two schools alerted the Nebraska School Activities Association about some trans students who wanted to compete on winter sports teams, so the NSAA decided to take up the issue again.

In January this year, the NSAA announced its big idea: A Gender Identity Eligibility Committee will make decisions on a case-by-case basis for trans student athletes who want to play on teams matching their gender identity. The committee—made up of a doctor with experience in trans health care, a mental health professional, a school administrator, and an NSAA staff member—will consider testimony from the student’s parents, friends, and teachers, plus medical documentation, to make sure the student consistently identifies as transgender. It will also require trans girls to have sex reassignment surgery or a year’s worth of hormone therapy to reduce testosterone levels. And to play on a team, a student will need unanimous approval from the committee.

The backlash came quickly, with critics on the left decrying the gender review process as burdensome. “They have essentially put up a sign that transgender students need not apply,” said Amy Miller, a legal director for the ACLU. For starters, critics say, many teenagers don’t want to go on hormone therapy. “It’s expensive, it’s a lot of effort, it’s like going through puberty again,” says Dyas. And the idea of proving your gender to a group of strangers can be intimidating: “I would not be comfortable with that,” says Dyas, who organized a protest against the policy at the state Capitol with a handful of trans-rights supporters.

Critics on the right worry the policy makes it too easy for trans kids to compete. “As the father of two daughters, I would be very concerned about boys competing against my daughters in sports,” Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts said. The Nebraska Catholic bishops weighed in, too, noting that “this would certainly have a negative impact on students’ and society’s attitudes towards the fundamental nature of the human person and the family.”

Another concern is competitive advantage. When a trans girl raced in a high school track and field state championship in Alaska in May, protesters showed up at the track. “Allowing students to play on teams of the opposite sex disproportionately impacts female students, who will lose spots on a track, soccer and volleyball teams to male students who identify as female,” said Jim Minnery, president of the conservative group Alaska Family Action. Karissa Niehoff, of the Connecticut Association of Schools, says signs of a competitive advantage haven’t come to fruition in her state since it dropped its hormone-based policy for trans teen athletes.

Susan Cahn, a professor at the University at Buffalo who wrote Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, can understand why female athletes might be wary about trans competitors. “Historically, girls and women have been the disadvantaged group, and they’ve been kept out of sports or haven’t been given the same kinds of training or resources,” she says. But trans kids are a disadvantaged group, too, who often put up with bullying and discrimination, she points out.

And even when we segregate sports by sex, certain kids have physical advantages. For boys’ sports, “if you look at a 9th- or 10th-grade team, you’ve got these little kids who haven’t hit puberty yet, and these giant kids, boys who have totally hit puberty. They have completely different bodies, and no one says they shouldn’t play together,” she explains. What’s more, a kid can have an upper hand for reasons unrelated to sex, like if his family has enough money to pay for summer training camps or traveling teams with the best coaches. Of all the different types of advantages, she says, testosterone is not the most critical, especially for teenagers, “so to fixate on that one is really about the politics of gender and not actual bodies.”

And the politics of gender—or rather, gender identity—have reached a fever pitch, not only in Nebraska, but on the national stage. In May this year, the US Department of Education sent a letter to public schools across the country, saying they could lose federal funding if they discriminated against transgender students. The letter made waves for its guidance on bathroom access—it said trans kids should be allowed to use facilities of their choice. It also called on schools to allow transgender kids to play on sports teams matching their identity, notes Sarah Axelson, a Title IX expert at the Women’s Sports Foundation.

Leaders in many states saw this letter as an overreach. So they turned to the courts. Now, Nebraska and 22 other states are suing the Obama administration, arguing that it has interpreted Title IX too broadly by including protections for transgender kids. On August 21, a federal judge in Texas ruled in their favor, granting a nationwide injunction that temporarily blocks the Obama administration from enforcing the recommendations in its letter about transgender rights. The administration is expected to appeal. Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court is considering whether to take up a separate case about whether Title IX protects transgender students. Griffin, who helped develop the policy for trans college athletes, says she suspects that if Nebraska and other states prevail in their legal fight with the Obama administration, it will affect not only bathroom access, but sports participation.

Nebraska’s new athletic policy, adopted before this legal drama unfolded, says trans athletes have to use bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding with their birth sex or, when possible, a private facility—even if they qualify to play on teams matching their preferred gender.

“You’ve fought and you’ve fought to be able to play on the sports team,” Dyas says in response to this caveat. “And finally you’re allowed to be the boy, you’re allowed to have everything you’ve ever wanted. And then right then and there, they rip it all out of your hands and are like, ‘But actually you can’t even use the locker room.'”

Jim Tenopir, the head of Nebraska’s high school athletics association, acknowledges that this rule “flies in the face of” the Obama administration’s guidance but aligns closely with the state of Nebraska’s position on protecting the privacy rights of other kids.

Asher Wells just started his junior year at Lincoln High. He’d been considering whether to try out for the boys’ tennis team this year, but in the end he decided against it. Even if he were good enough, he worries the Gender Identity Eligibility Committee wouldn’t approve his application, he says. “And I would have to get a school physical exam, and I haven’t done that because I feel uncomfortable.” He’s also nervous about getting bullied during matches at other schools. “I’ll think about it for next year,” he says.

As executive director of the NSAA, Tenopir says he intended to create an athletic policy that gave all Nebraskan kids a chance to compete, regardless of gender identity: “Although there may be some steep hills that a transgender student has to climb to be eligible to participate, at least that opportunity is there.”

Tenopir acknowledges that high school “is probably a borderline age for kids to consider” hormone therapy. But he adds that the policy would have never been approved without this requirement—given the political muscle of right-leaning critics who argued that trans girls would otherwise have an unfair advantage. “You don’t begin to have an idea what conservative values are until you get to a place like Nebraska,” he says.

As the school year kicks off, it’s unclear when the state’s new Gender Identity Eligibility Committee will be put to the test—Tenopir says that so far, not a single transgender student has applied.

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High Schools Are the Next Battleground in the Fight Over Transgender Athletes

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A Federal Judge Just Stopped Trans Students From Using the Bathrooms of Their Choice

by JaymeSeibert Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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The school year is off to a rough start for transgender students. A federal judge in Texas has given public schools across the country permission to ignore the Obama administration’s instructions to let trans kids use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, rather than their birth sex.

In May, the US Department of Education sent a guidance to public schools, saying they could lose federal funding if they kept trans kids out of bathrooms of their choice. On Sunday, a federal judge in Texas granted a preliminary, nationwide injunction that blocks the department’s guidance from being enforced. The injunction also prevents the Obama administration from using the guidelines in any lawsuits.

The decision comes in response to a lawsuit filed by 13 states against the Obama administration over the federal government’s position on bathroom choice for students.

“Defendants have conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights,” representatives for the states wrote in the lawsuit filed in May. The case was filed by a long list of state attorneys general, including Ken Paxton of Texas, Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.

A main question in the case is whether Title IX, a civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools, also bars discrimination on the basis of gender identity. The Obama administration says it does. The suing states argue that references to “sex” in Title IX refer only to biological sex.

US District Judge Reed O’Connor granted the nationwide injunction because the states that filed the lawsuit have a strong chance of winning their case, he wrote in his decision, which was filed on Sunday.

“It cannot be disputed,” he wrote, “that the plain meaning of the term sex as used…following passage of Title IX meant the biological and anatomical difference between male and female students as determined at their birth.” He noted that the injunction would only apply to states that want to separate school bathrooms according to biological sex. Other states can maintain policies allowing kids to use facilities based on gender identity.

“I’m pleased the court has ruled against the Obama Administration’s latest overreach,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote on Twitter following the decision. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union, which has represented transgender students in other civil rights cases, and four other civil rights groups blasted the judge’s ruling in a joint statement.

“The court’s misguided decision targets a small, vulnerable group of young people…for potential continued harassment, stigma and abuse,” the statement said.

The impact of the injunction may be limited, however. Legal experts told the New York Times that higher-level courts in other regions have previously sided with the Obama administration’s view that transgender people are protected by existing anti-sex-discrimination laws, and those rulings won’t be affected by the new injunction.

The Texas decision follows a similar order from the US Supreme Court. Earlier this month, the high court’s justices temporarily blocked a transgender boy in Virginia from using the boys’ bathroom at his school while the justices decide whether to take up a case concerning that school board’s bathroom policy. If the justices agree to hear the case, it would be the first time the Supreme Court has weighed in on this issue.

The 13 states suing the Obama administration include Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah, Georgia, Maine, Arizona, Kentucky, and Mississippi. Separately, 10 other states sued the Obama administration in July over the same issue. Those states include Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

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A Federal Judge Just Stopped Trans Students From Using the Bathrooms of Their Choice

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Cool Ghouls’ Trippy Goodness

by MyraWetter Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Cool Ghouls
Animal Races
Empty Cellar

Courtesy of Empty Cellar Records

Fire up the incense, dust off those love beads, and reconnect the strobe light: The San Francisco band Cool Ghouls has a fine new album of trippy goodness. Fusing glistening folk melodies, jangly, psychedelia-tinged guitars, and woozy vocals evoking the search for a higher state, Animal Races dares to echo long-ago greats like Jefferson Airplane and Arthur Lee’s Love, but never feels nostalgic. There’s a refreshing rough edge to the quartet that suggests they’re making it up as they go, not following some dusty recipe book. Should you be so inclined, there’s armchair philosophizing in such mesmerizing tunes as the title track and “Time Capsule,” but simply surfing the Ghouls’ sublime waves of sound is a delicious pleasure for its own sake.

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Cool Ghouls’ Trippy Goodness

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The Unauthorized History of the GOP’s 30-Year War on Planned Parenthood

by CorneliGandon Posted on August 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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As a secretive anti-abortion group continues to leak videos selectively edited to portray Planned Parenthood officials breaking federal law, a swarm of states, from New Hampshire to Utah, have renewed efforts to strip the country’s largest women’s health care organization of government funding.

The number of attacks is unprecedented. Just a few weeks after Republicans in Congress made a failed attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Utah—have cut off Planned Parenthood from federal and state Medicaid dollars. The funds, intended for low-income women, pay for family planning services, breast cancer and STI screenings, and abortions in cases of rape or threats to the health or life of the mother. The Obama administration warned two governors that the move violated federal law protecting patients’ rights to choose their provider. But that didn’t stop new states, including Arkansas, from continuing to slash the funds after the warning came down.

“This is the longest and broadest set of attacks we have seen,” says Elizabeth Nash, a researcher for the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights think tank.

But history shows that anti-abortion lawmakers don’t need damning videos to mount attacks on Planned Parenthood. A look back at these older attempts to defund Planned Parenthood shows that today’s onslaught is part of a broader, three-decade-old campaign by anti-abortion lawmakers to jeopardize family planning dollars.

This timeline traces the history of the crusade against Planned Parenthood, and with it, the destruction of family planning programs that continues today.

1979

The Minnesota legislature passes a sweeping law to end all state family planning funding to groups offering abortion, abortion counseling, or referrals. A federal judge strikes down the law in 1980, noting, “Planned Parenthood’s unpopularity in and of itself and without reference to some independent considerations in the public interest cannot justify the law.” Similar laws in Arizona and North Dakota also tank. Anti-abortion activists start seeking a work-around to the rulings.

1980

In Utah, lawmakers reroute $390,000 in family planning funds from the Planned Parenthood’s five clinics to county health departments.

1984

The Reagan administration imposes a new policy that prevents any foreign funding from going to health care providers that perform abortions. The move applies to hundreds of millions of dollars the government sets aside to promote family planning in impoverished countries. The policy is in place until President Bill Clinton rolls it back in 1993.

Colorado approves a constitutional amendment banning state funds from being spent on abortions.

1985

California legislators accidentally send Gov. George Deukmejian a version of the state budget that bars any group providing abortion services from receiving money from the state’s $34 million annual family planning budget. Deukmejian, a Republican, refuses to veto the measure, which lawmakers had previously voted to remove. “The clear target of the provision, which was introduced…at the request of anti-abortion groups, is Planned Parenthood and its 16 local affiliates,” the Los Angeles Times reported. An appeals court struck the measure down.

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The Unauthorized History of the GOP’s 30-Year War on Planned Parenthood

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No, the fight over Planned Parenthood is not over

by BrandiKirke0 Posted on August 4, 2015

Protesters stand on a sidewalk outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Vista, Calif., on August 3, 2015. Reuters / Mike Blake

No, the fight over Planned Parenthood is not over

By on 4 Aug 2015commentsShare

On Monday, the Senate — by a margin of seven votes — voted down the Sen. Jodi Ernst (R-Iowa)-sponsored bill that would eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Fifty-three senators voted in favor of said bill, with 46 voting against it, which failed to meet the 60-vote majority required for the bill to avoid a filibuster. On one hand, great — the bill didn’t pass, as was expected! But on the other hand, more than half of our elected officials in the Senate don’t believe that Planned Parenthood, an indispensable institution for national public health, deserves public funding. As a result, this issue is certainly going to come up again this fall, when it’s time for the government spending bill to pass.

Planned Parenthood is under attack on a state level, too: After the Senate GOP loss, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) announced that the state would immediately terminate its Medicaid contract with Planned Parenthood, effectively cutting off access to services for 4,300 low-income, uninsured clients. Louisiana is already the not-so-proud mother of some of the worst reproductive health statistics in the country.

To review, this whole mess is spurred by one extremist organization releasing intentionally misleading and inaccurate videos on Planned Parenthood activities surrounding abortion — which, for the record, only make up 3 percent of the organization’s services and have not been federally funded since 1976.

A very brief rundown of the public health good that Planned Parenthood provides: The organization serves 37 percent of all clients who rely on Title X-funded health centers and offers contraceptive care that prevents over 500,000 unintended pregnancies annually. And overwhelmingly, the women and men who depend on Planned Parenthood are low-income and, without its services, would be left without access to necessary procedures like Pap smears, STD testing, and breast, ovarian, and uterine cancer screenings.

Ongoing threats to defund and destroy Planned Parenthood, and publicly funded family planning organizations like it, are more than just large-scale acts of aggression on women. They are direct attacks on a very specific segment of women — those who are poor, or undocumented, or very young. They are those who, quite literally, have nowhere else to go.

It’s 2015, and the United States is still torn in two over a woman’s right to control her reproductive health. If you’d like to go ahead and cryogenically freeze yourself to get away from this absurd saga, don’t bother — I’m willing to bet, based on history, that we’ll still be in the same spot in 50 or 100 years. That is, if we’re not all underwater or on fire by then.

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No, the fight over Planned Parenthood is not over

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Taylor Swift: "Misogyny Is Ingrained in People From the Time They Are Born"

by SalvatoRech Posted on May 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to this year’s “Hot 100” list, an annual inventory in which Maxim‘s editors meticulously rank famous women by level of attractiveness, Taylor Swift is 2015’s reigning queen of female hotness. Rather than use the title to gloat about her declared hotness, Swift used the magazine’s cover to call out the double standards women face everyday and the importance of feminism in her life today: From Maxim:

Honestly, I didn’t have an accurate definition of feminism when I was younger. I didn’t quite see all the ways that feminism is vital to growing up in the world we live in. I think that when I used to say, “Oh, feminism’s not really on my radar,” it was because when I was just seen as a kid, I wasn’t as threatening. I didn’t see myself being held back until I was a woman. Or the double standards in headlines, the double standards in the way stories are told, the double standards in the way things are perceived.

Swift’s interview is especially noteworthy considering in 2012, she shied away from the label to the Daily Beast, telling the news site she didn’t view matters as a “guys versus girls” situation. This was also during a time in which the media unfairly portrayed Swift as something of a pathetic boy chaser—a female singer who used her lyrics to lament about the latest boy who got away.

Since then, she has shattered that image with very real, thoughtful insight into an industry built on sexist frameworks:

A man writing about his feelings from a vulnerable place is brave; a woman writing about her feelings from a vulnerable place is oversharing or whining. Misogyny is ingrained in people from the time they are born. So to me, feminism is probably the most important movement that you could embrace, because it’s just basically another word for equality.

This is what young girls need today. Now, we leave you with her badass new video, “Bad Blood.”

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Taylor Swift: "Misogyny Is Ingrained in People From the Time They Are Born"

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Why the Duke Basketball Sexual-Assault Story Won’t Go Away Quickly

by WYYDeannahxhjqz Posted on March 2, 2015

Mother Jones

The Duke University student newspaper reported today that a player recently dismissed from the school’s powerhouse men’s basketball team had been twice accused of sexual assault. Moreover, it found that athletic department officials, including Hall of Fame coach Mike Krzyzewski, knew about the allegations as early as last March but failed to act for months.

According to the Chronicle, two different women claimed that junior guard Rasheed Sulaimon had sexually assaulted them during the 2013-14 school year. In October 2013, a woman told classmates at a retreat that Sulaimon had assaulted her; at the same retreat in February 2014, another woman made a similar claim. The Chronicle reported that the team psychologist was made aware of the allegations in March 2014, and that several key members of the athletic department—including Krzyzewski, several assistant coaches, and athletic director Kevin White—found out shortly thereafter.

At a press conference, Krzyzewski declined to comment on the Chronicle article. But here are three reasons why this particular story won’t be going away anytime soon:

Slow response: Neither woman filed a complaint with the university or went to the local police in part due to “the fear of backlash from the Duke fan base,” according to the Chronicle. Nonetheless, the allegations reportedly were brought to the coaching staff shortly after the second incident was disclosed. According to the Chronicle, most Duke employees are required to report sexual assault; under Title IX, the university must investigate any such allegations. “Nothing happened after months and months of talking about the sexual assault allegations,” an anonymous source told the newspaper. “The University administration knew.”

It’s Duke, and Coach K: It has been nearly nine years since the Duke lacrosse rape case, which fell apart after months of intense scrutiny and media attention. Given the prominence of Krzyzewski and his program—he has the most wins of any Division I coach in history, and the Blue Devils are ranked No. 3 in the country—this story could gain a lot more traction as March Madness nears. Sulaimon was the first player Krzyzewski has dismissed in his 35 years at Duke; here’s how the coach described the decision in a January 29 press release: “Rasheed has been unable to consistently live up to the standards required to be a member of our program. It is a privilege to represent Duke University and with that privilege comes the responsibility to conduct oneself in a certain manner. After Rasheed repeatedly struggled to meet the necessary obligations, it became apparent that it was time to dismiss him from the program.”

It’s yet another sexual-assault accusation against a college athlete: The Sulaimon story comes just days after a former Louisville University basketball player was charged with rape and sodomy. On January 27, two former Vanderbilt University football players were convicted on multiple counts of sexual battery and aggravated rape, a case dissected in a Sports Illustrated feature last month. And in another highly publicized recent case, Jameis Winston, Florida State University’s Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback and the likely No. 1 pick in the upcoming NFL draft, was accused but never charged of raping a fellow student. (The school recently cleared Winston of violating its code of conduct.)

This post has been updated.

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Why the Duke Basketball Sexual-Assault Story Won’t Go Away Quickly

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Catholic Church Argues It Doesn’t Have to Show Up in Court Because Religious Freedom

by ManiePrescott Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Emily Herx first took time off work for in vitro fertilization treatment, her boss offered what sounded like words of support: “You are in my prayers.” Soon those words took on a more sinister meaning. The Indiana grade school where Herx was teaching English was Catholic. And after church officials were alerted that Herx was undergoing IVF—making her, in the words of one monsignor, “a grave, immoral sinner”—it took them less than two weeks to fire her.

Herx filed a discrimination lawsuit in 2012. In response, St. Vincent de Paul School and the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese, her former employers, countered with an argument used by a growing number of religious groups to justify firings related to IVF treatment or pregnancies outside of marriage: Freedom of religion gives them the right to hire (or fire) whomever they choose. But the diocese took one big step further. It is arguing that, in this instance, its religious liberty rights protect the school from having to go to court at all.

“I’ve never seen this before, and I couldn’t find any other cases like it,” says Brian Hauss, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Center for Liberty. The group is not directly involved in the lawsuit but has filed amicus briefs supporting Herx. “What the diocese is saying is, ‘We can fire anybody, and we have absolute immunity from even going to trial, as long as we think they’re violating our religion. And to have civil authorities even look into what we’re doing is a violation.’…It’s astonishing.”

The key legal question in Herx’s case is whether she was fired for religious reasons or her firing was an illegal act of sex discriminations.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bans employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. An exemption in that law allows religious institutions to favor members of their own faith during the hiring process. But there’s no religious exemption for sex discrimination—which is how Herx is framing her dismissal. As proof, she showed that the diocese had never fired a male teacher for using any type of infertility treatment. In response, the diocese asserted that it would fire a male teacher who underwent fertility treatments against church teachings—it just hasn’t done so yet. In early September, a federal judge ruled that there was enough evidence on both sides of the dispute for a jury trial.

That’s when the diocese launched its radical new legal strategy.

The diocese argued that a trial on this question would violate its freedom of religion and appealed the judge’s decision to a three-judge panel on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. “If the diocese is required to go through a trial,” attorneys for the diocese and school argued, it would “irrevocably” deny Fort Wayne-South Bend the benefits of religious protection. Herx’s attorneys are fighting the appeal.

A spokesman for the diocese and an attorney and for the diocese and school both declined to comment.

“Employers try to appeal these decisions all the time. But this is unusual because of the incredibly broad claim to a religious exemption they’re making,” says Susan Deller Ross, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who has written about Title VII and worked on sex discrimination cases. Thomas Brejcha, the president of the Thomas More Society, a conservative religious liberty legal group, called the move “creative, venturesome, and unusual.” He adds, “I’m very interested to see what happens.”

Louise Melling, a deputy legal director at the ACLU, was more critical: “It’s an unusual and extreme argument, to be saying the court doesn’t even have the legal authority to ask whether this was, in fact, sex discrimination. I can’t imagine they would prevail on that. It’s too extreme.”

Than again, Melling says she never would have predicted the recent wave of cases in which religious institutions asserted that they have an expansive right to discriminate. One of those cases was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby—the Supreme Court case that struck down the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The ACLU has also seen a climb in the number of Christian schools arguing that Title VII allows them to fire women who undergo IVF or become pregnant outside of marriage, or to fire employees who engage in same-sex relationships. “Hobby Lobby was just one case in this wave,” Melling says.

Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, says the diocese’s assertion is a “perfectly sensible argument.” Laycock, who has successfully argued numerous religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court, notes there is precedent for immunizing certain organizations from trial, although not necessarily under Title VII’s religious protections. “I think it’s going to be a hard sell,” he says. “But I don’t know that it’s ‘extreme.'”

Eventually, a case like Herx’s could reach the Supreme Court. There are at least four other high-profile lawsuits like Herx’s under way at the federal level. Four women—Jennifer Maudlin, a former cook at an Ohio religious community center; Teri James, a former financial-aid specialist for San Diego Christian College; Shaela Evenson, a former Catholic school teacher with the Helena Diocese in Montana; and Shanna Daly, a former teacher with St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic School in Florida—are suing their former employers for firing them because they became pregnant outside of marriage. Daly claims she was fired because she refused to get married until the church annulled her previous marriage. Each of these women filed their cases within the last two years.

“It’s striking that this is still an issue, that people are still firing women for getting IVF and being pregnant and unmarried,” Melling says. “It all feels so medieval.”

It is also hypocritical, according to Herx. Other teachers in the diocese, she claims, have undergone hysterectomies, vasectomies, and tubal ligations without any employment consequences, even though the church teaches that deliberate sterilization is immoral. Herx and her doctor made sure that none of the embryos created for her infertility treatment were intentionally destroyed. Herx’s school principal approved sick days for her IVF treatment. And the diocese’s health insurance plan, which the diocese directly administers without the help of a third party, paid for Herx’s visits to the fertility doctor and the anesthesia she required.

Ross agrees that the appeals court is unlikely to buy into the diocese’s argument. “That would have an extreme impact,” she says. “But with law you can never say never.”

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Catholic Church Argues It Doesn’t Have to Show Up in Court Because Religious Freedom

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Into the Crazy Closet With Roz Chast

by KaiJensonyff Posted on May 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Plus: Vintage Chast cartoons from the pages of Mother Jones.

You know a Roz Chast character when you see one: a person, often on a sofa, whose bemused, slightly off-kilter expression suggests some deeper angst or anger. The longtime New Yorker cartoonist’s new memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, introduces two real-life characters: her parents, George and Elizabeth, a sweet motormouth who “chain-worried the way others might chain-smoke” and an outspoken assistant principal known for her furious “blasts from Chast.” The book chronicles their reluctant slide into extreme old age, which left Chast, now 59, to sift through decades of emotional baggage and mountains of stuff—like their junk-crammed “Crazy Closet.” Her poignant, funny story will resonate with anyone who’s experienced the roller coaster of an elderly relative’s final years.

Mother Jones: As a child you felt your parents had their own thing going and you were kind of in the way. When did you come to that realization?

Roz Chast: Probably pretty young. I was an only child, and they worked. They’d been together for a very long time before I was born. They were very connected to each other. They were older—chronologically and in a lot of other ways—than my friends’ parents. I never saw my father wear any kind of pants except for, like, man pants, those gray slacks. Forget jeans. Not even corduroys or khakis. When we’d go to the beach, they’d be wearing their street clothes. They weren’t very casual.

A Roz Chast cartoon that appeared in Mother Jones in December 1984 Roz Chast/Mother Jones

MJ: How have your views on aging changed as a result of caring for them?

RC: It’s definitely made me think a lot more about it. Recently I was visiting my son and we went to this huge indoor flea market. At first it was like, This is great, this is wonderful. And then within a few minutes, I just looked around and felt like, I just threw away all this shit. This is all dead-people stuff, crap that people got rid of that was maybe in their old apartment or in their parents house or whatever. Do I want this cute little alarm clock from 1962? Not really. So I just have a different feeling about stuff. And as I get older, it’s not likely to completely go away. I could be wrong. I could decide to suddenly collect cute alarm clocks.

MJ: So you don’t have a Crazy Closet?

RC: Every drawer is like a mini-Crazy Closet. I’m just hoping it doesn’t get that bad. I didn’t go through the Depression like my parents did.

MJ: Were they unable to throw stuff away as a result?

RC: Oh yeah! You didn’t throw away jar lids or Band-Aid boxes. There was a drawer of those amber plastic vials, what pills come in—you might need them for, I don’t know, three cotton balls or something. It was borderline hoarding. They didn’t throw away old clothes. They just shoved things in the closet so everything was pressed. I think I must have been the only person who really understood why Joan Crawford was so upset about the wire hangers. It was just like, She’s right! She’s right!

MJ: Your mom was adamant that she and your dad were “going to 100” together. Do you share that determination?

RC: I really don’t. On the other hand, how would I know what it feels like to be that age any more than a person who’s 25 can understand what it feels like to be 50?

MJ: Your title refers to your parents’ reluctance to talk about aging or dying.

RC: I think it’s pretty representative of our world, our culture. We don’t really talk about it. You just take old people and you put them in a place, and I hope that doesn’t happen to me, but it’s not like I’m actively doing anything to prevent that—which is weird.

MJ: It’s hard to know what the alternatives are, though. You talk, tongue in cheek but also seriously, about how your final years could be made happier: Why not eat all the ice cream you want or take opium or even have hemlock as an option?

RC: I’d rather take opium than hemlock. I sometimes think, once you’re lying there, why not do something that might be fun?

A Roz Chast cartoon that appeared in Mother Jones in May 1988 Roz Chast/Mother Jones

MJ: At what age did you realize you wanted to be a cartoonist?

RC: I used to love to draw things that made me laugh or made friends laugh. When I was 13 or 14, I started thinking, This is what I like to do more than anything else.

MJ: Your work often has people sitting on living-room sofas. In your book, even Death sits on one. Do sofas hold some sort of significance for you?

RC: I just like drawing them.

MJ: The New Yorker is notorious for its weekly cartoon pitch process. What’s your hit-to-miss ratio?

RC: It goes in streaks. I could not sell for three weeks and then sell three weeks in a row and then not sell for two weeks and then sell for one. Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor, talked once about this experiment with rats and pellets. The rats that pushed down the lever and got a pellet every time would eventually get bored, and the rats that never got any pellets would eventually stop pushing. But where it was random, where they’d push down the lever and get three pellets, and then three pushes and no pellets, and then a push and two pellets—they’d keep on pushing forever. I think about that a lot. I think that cartoonists are the rats with the levers.

Link: 

Into the Crazy Closet With Roz Chast

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…But Does a Fire Tornado in Australia Spin the Other Way?

by LeesaRicketson Posted on April 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last weekend I posted a video taken not too far from where I live showing a “fire tornado”—really a spinning vortex of rising air drawing its power from fire on the ground. It was pretty dramatic, mostly due to hundreds of tumbleweeds swirling around it, drawn in by the rotating column of wind.

After posting it, I got a note from Chris Tangey, who specializes in photography in Australia’s Outback. He took some footage of a fire tornado in 2012 (watch above) that he claimed was better than what I posted…and he’s right.

Chris Tangey/Vimeo

Yegads. The speed and power of such a vortex depends on how quickly the air in the middle can rise, which in turn draws in air from farther out; as that air spins and falls in the rotation speeds up, tightening the vortex and magnifying it. As you can see in the fire, spurts of flame leap up the inside of the vortex, clearly giving it more strength. The sound and speed of it are enthralling.

I had never heard of this phenomenon until a year or so ago. But now there are cameras everywhere…and, sadly, with global warming likely increasing both the number and severity of wildfires, we’re bound to see lots more footage like this.

Note: The title of this post is a joke; in general the Coriolis force only acts on far larger scales, so I would think a vortex like this (such as a dust devil) is just as likely to spin clockwise as counterclockwise. It would be interesting to see some statistic on this, though!

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…But Does a Fire Tornado in Australia Spin the Other Way?

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