Stop Supporting Bigoted Institutions
Religion shouldn't be an excuse for sex discrimination.
Seattle Pacific University is currently under investigation by the Washington State Attorney General for discriminatory hiring practices, because the university refuses to hire gay faculty and staff. The lawyers for Seattle Pacific claim that separation of church and state allows them to operate as they please; anti-LGBT discrimination is their right and it’s none of the state’s business.
And that’s fair enough, to some extent. If private religious institutions want to discriminate in their private practice of their religion, they should be able to — but they should not receive any federal or state benefits. To the extent that these institutions are engaged in a practice that is primarily not religious but secular and serving the general public — say, educating college students or running a nursing home or providing health care — they should have to abide by the same laws as any other institution providing those same services. And if Seattle Pacific or any other religious entity doesn’t want to abide by Washington State’s anti-discrimination law, or by federal anti-discrimination laws, then they should at the very least not be permitted to avail themselves of federal tax exemptions and federal benefits programs, including federal student loan funds to pay student tuition.
This goes far beyond a single university. Over and over again, institutions that flat-out discriminate are still handed generous benefits, funded by the state, and even supported, funded, and attended by self-identified progressives.
This is particularly true when the locus of the discrimination is gender-based, and when the institution is religious. We seem to have simply collectively decided that it’s ok for religious institutions to discriminate against women or LGBT people in a way we would never accept — and should never accept — if that discrimination came in other forms.
Take the Catholic Church, a formal patriarchy that bars women from the positions of high leadership. I have a hard time believing that if the Catholic Church had a formal policy that only white people of European descent could be in positions of power — could be priests, popes, bishops, etc — that any decent person would set foot in a Catholic Church. I suspect that there would be pretty significant pushback from progressives to the federal government giving them tax breaks and funding their programs around the world.
This was indeed the case with Bob Jones University, an Evangelical institution that was at first totally racially segregated, and later admitted Black students but adopted a racist policy against interracial dating. In 1970, the IRS decided that institutions that racially discriminate, even religious ones, were not entitled to federal tax exemptions; Bob Jones lost its tax-exempt status from the 1970s until 2000, when it ended its racially discriminatory policies after George W. Bush spoke at the school and set off a media firestorm. Bob Jones was then given 501(c)(3) status — despite continuing policies of gender discrimination and discrimination against LGBT staff, faculty, and students.
The LDS church also barred Black men from the priesthood and from even walking into a Mormon church, a ban that wasn’t lifted until 1978 — in part, some speculate, because the LDS church feared it would face the same tax problems as Bob Jones. The LDS church still does not allow women to enter the priesthood, and explicitly bars women from a whole series of positions within the church hierarchy, and preaches that women must be subservient to men in the home and in society more broadly. Still, the LDS church enjoys generous tax breaks. Still, while some other Christian sects certainly look askance at Mormonism, it is not treated as a wholly toxic entity, membership in which rightly tars you as a bigot unfit for, say, elected office.
The examples of straight-up gender discrimination in religious institutions go farther and wider than just these examples, from Orthodox Jewish institutions that refuse to ordain women as rabbis and do not grant women equal divorce rights to mosques that require gender segregation (and often stick women in the back, and have leaders that give women fewer rights in divorce and inheritance) to various Christian sects where women are barred from holding any position of authority over men. Some Christian adoption agencies receive state funding but nevertheless refuse to adopt out to same-sex couples, or even couples that aren’t Christian — Jews, for example, need not apply for parenthood. Religious legal mechanisms — religious adjudication of marriage and divorce, religious arbitration clauses that make disputes governable by religious texts and not US law — proliferate in the United States, and lend themselves quite explicitly to gender discrimination: If your divorce is governed by Biblical or Islamic or Jewish law, you may not get a fair shake if you’re a woman; if your dispute is about being discriminated against for being, say, LGBT or female, you’re unlikely to get a fair shake in religious arbitration, either. And yet these procedures remain generally legal — a kind of parallel discriminatory system that keeps a great many people outside of the protection of US law.
This is not to say that gender discrimination persists while racial discrimination has become unacceptable. Racial discrimination remains widely practiced and radically under-addressed. It is to say that different forms of discrimination are treated differently in different venues, and in a religious context in the year 2022, gender discrimination in religious institutions is all but expected; discriminating against women in a religious setting imposes virtually no costs, and there is no appetite from the government to curb or penalize it. Sexual abuse, maybe, but sex discrimination? It is so engrained in so many major religions that it’s virtually invisible.
We don’t actually have to tolerate discriminatory and abusive policies just because they come along with a particular religious faith.
If practitioners of a discriminatory and misogynist religion want to fold sex discrimination into their religious life — if they want to bar women from positions of authority in their churches or temples or mosques; if they want to have different rules for women and men in the family — they should be able to do so within their faith communities. But they shouldn’t have the right to violate otherwise generally-applicable laws; they should have no legal authority over issues like divorce or inheritance; and any member of that faith community should be able to avail themselves of generally-applicable laws. They shouldn’t be able to impose a parallel system of law that cuts women off from rights they would have in a secular setting. They should not be able to claim that religious faith governs any secular activities they engage in, whether those activities are for profit or charitable. And they should not be able to discriminate and also enjoy the full support — or any support — from taxpayers. They should not be able to discriminate and receive state or federal tax exemptions, and they definitely should not receive state or federal dollars.
And frankly, they should not be able to discriminate against women without being consistently criticized, socially ostracized, and tarred as misogynist institutions that it is shameful to be affiliated with.
Faith is, for so many people, a crucial organizer of social and cultural life. It offers meaning and direction; it is where many people find community and connection; it inspires many to act with greater generosity, to live with integrity, and to consider themselves part of something much larger and more profound than they can see with their own two eyes. This is not an argument against faith itself, nor one against attending or supporting faith-based institutions. It is an argument, though, for living your values even where it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable. And if those values include fairness, decency, and certainly feminism, then this is absolutely an argument for rejecting rank misogyny, even when that misogyny comes with the veneer of faith.
It’s that last bit that progressives can start doing right now.
xx Jill