This is such an important and timely topic right now as the Biden DOJ has just filed a legal brief endorsing religious discrimination against lgbtq people and opposing REAP’s lawsuit supporting students that religious colleges and universities are persecuting with the protection of religious exemptions from Title IX requirements.
Catholic institutions are at the front of the line demanding these exemptions. Jesuits are particularly insidious about making it all sound so reasonable. One of the reasons that I detest Jesuit institutions and thinkers so much is that they work SO hard to make persecution of LGBTQ people sound okay and ordinary, so long as it’s not too terribly bad.
Remember the Catholic high school teacher with cancer? Who the church fired despite the fact doing that would have been illegal under ordinary civil rights law? Yeah, they claim the religious exemption for that. And so far they’ve won in court. That’s despicable. Religious institutions that take advantage of these exemptions are morally despicable. Make no mistake, the people who run Loyola University are morally despicable for taking advantage of exceptions to ordinary civil rights legislation. They may try to pretend to themselves that what they’re doing is reasonable, but their insidious argument makes them more morally repugnant not less.
It’s discouraging to see so many people, including a lot of lgbtq people and very many people who call themselves progressive, pushing back against the idea that religious exemptions to civil rights law must end — utterly, totally, and right now.
I just wrote the following article, and I’m taking hell for it all over the internet. This shows us exactly how big our problem is with the insidious normalization of discrimination against LGBTQ people. And Jesuit thinkers are part of the problem, not the solution.
