Jews and Judaism

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Justice Amy Coney Barrett could soon prove crucial on legal fights over religious vs. LGBTQ rights 

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Senators, other pols and the news media are agog this week over the impact a Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, age 48, might have on abortion law long-term and -- immediately -- disputes over the election results and a challenge to Obamacare that comes up for oral arguments November 10.

But reporters on the politics, law or religion beats shouldn't ignore Barrett's potential impact on the continual struggles between religious freedom claims under the Bill of Rights versus LGBTQ rights the Court established in its 2015 Obergefell ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. Oral arguments in a crucial test case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia [19-123], will occur the day after Election Day — when journalists will be preoccupied with furious tabulation of absentee ballots.

At issue is whether Philadelphia violated Constitutional religious freedom in 2018 by halting the longstanding work of Catholic Social Services in the city's foster care system because church teaching doesn't allow placement of children with same-sex couples.

Such disputes first won media attention when Massachusetts legalized gay marriage and in 2006 shut down the adoption service of Boston Catholic Charities. which did not place children with same-sex couples. A prescient 2006 Weekly Standard piece by marriage traditionalist Maggie Gallagher explored the broader implications for religious agencies and colleges in free speech, freedom of association, employment law and tax exemption.

The Becket Fund, which represents the Fulton plaintiffs, produced this useful 2008 anthology covering all sides on these issues.

On October 5, the legal jousting heated up when Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, issued a protest found within this memo (.pdf here).They dissented on Obergefell, but their chief concern now is that the court's ambiguity "continues to have ruinous consequences for religious liberty" that only SCOTUS itself can and must now remedy. A two-line Slate.com. headline typified reactions of the cultural Left:

Two Supreme Court Justices Just Put Marriage Equality on the Chopping Block

LGBT rights were already in jeopardy. If Amy Coney Barrett gets confirmed, they're likely doomed


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Plug-in: Press handles religion differently in news coverage of Ginsburg and Barrett

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The big news this past week was, of course, the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the furor over President Donald Trump’s intention to nominate a replacement before the election.

There were faith angles galore and — for added intrigue — questions over whether journalists applied different standards to the religion of Ginsburg, the liberal icon, and that of 7th Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the justice’s possible conservative successor.

For example, Religion News Service extolled Ginsburg as “passionate about Judaism’s concern for justice,” while characterizing Barrett as a “controversial Catholic” — a designation questioned by Religion Unplugged’s own Clemente Lisi. (P.S. Don’t miss Lisi’s fact check on Barrett’s faith.)

“Yes RBG’s religion shaped her approach,” RNS’ Bob Smietana said on Twitter. “And yes if (Barrett) is nominee it will be controversial. We can report both things.”

A Reuters story about “a self-described charismatic Christian community” to which Barrett purportedly belongs also drew scrutiny. At the conservative National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out a series of edits to the wire service’s original report.

“We all know what this means, in terms of press coverage,” GetReligion’s Terry Mattingly argued in a post in which he singled out praise for a story by New York Times religion writer Elizabeth Dias and her colleague Adam Liptak. “Many of the same reporters who are perfectly comfortable calling Joe Biden a ‘devout’ Catholic — while his actions clash with church doctrines on marriage and sex — are going to spill oceans of digital ink warning readers about the dangerous dogmas that dwell loudly in the heart and mind of Barrett.”

However, the focus on religion in the battle over the Supreme Court concerns Ira Rifkin Of GetReligion.org, a former RNS national correspondent who has covered domestic and foreign religious issues since the 1980s.

“It should not be about Amy Coney Barrett’s traditional Catholicism any more than Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s key attribute was that she was an ultra-liberal Jew. Or Martin Luther King Jr.’s liberal liberation Protestantism,” Rifkin said on Facebook.

“It should not be about ‘bad’ religion vs ‘good’ religion,” he added.


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'Culture wars' are about demographics: Thus, fertility is now a hot-button topic in news

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'Culture wars' are about demographics: Thus, fertility is now a hot-button topic in news

It was one of those happy social-media pictures, only this time the pregnant mother was celebrating with her nine children.

Los Angeles comedian and actor Kai Choyce was not amused and tweeted the photo with this comment: "this is environmental terrorism. … In the year 2020 literally no one should have ten kids."

The result was a long chain of sweet or snarky comments, as well as photos of large families. One tweet quoted a Swedish study claiming that having "one fewer child per family" can save an average of 58.6 tons of "CO2-equivalent emissions per year."

Debates about fertility often veer into fights about religion and other ultimate questions, such as the fate of the planet.

Parents with two-plus children are often making a statement about the role of religious faith in their lives. People on the other side of this debate have frequently rejected traditional forms of religion.

"What we call 'culture wars' are wars about demographics, but we have trouble discussing that," said historian Philip Jenkins, who is best known for decades of research into global religious trends, while teaching at Pennsylvania State and Baylor University. His latest book is "Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions."

In the 1970s, researchers thought the link between secularization and falling birth rates was a "Protestant thing" in Europe, but then this trend spread into Catholic cultures in Europe and in Latin America, he said. Fertility rates are now collapsing in Iran and some Islamic cultures. Meanwhile, Orthodox Jews and traditional Catholics continue to have larger families than liberal believers in those ancient faiths.

America's 2019 birth rate fell to 1.71, its lowest level in three decades, and well under the replacement rate of 2.1. This took place before the coronavirus pandemic and the Brookings Institute recently predicted a "COVID baby bust" next year, resulting in up to half a million fewer births.

Researchers frequently argue about which comes first -- secularization or declining fertility.

"I'm not sure that really matters because these two trends are so clearly related that they just march along together," said Jenkins.


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Press gets mythic about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's timely death on Rosh Hashanah eve

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Before every U.S. presidential election, there is almost always an “October surprise” that throws everything awry and has the potential to swing the contest in a completely different direction.

This year’s “surprise” happened Sept. 18 with the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The term “black swan” is also popular in social media, when talking about this kind of plot twist.

Barely a few minutes had passed after the announcement when a lot of folks noticed that she’d died just before the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, giving her instant mythic status with reporters from everything from NPR to Reuters. The latter described what last Friday was like for American Jews.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Just as many Jews in the United States were sitting down to a post-sunset Rosh Hashanah dinner on Friday, preparing to dip apples in honey to signal the sweetness of the year to come, news came of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death.

Ginsburg, the first female Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court, died on one of the holiest days in Judaism, as many of the country’s nearly six million Jews welcomed the new year 5781, based on the Hebrew calendar…

Her death on the eve of Rosh Hashanah also has significance in Jewish tradition, rabbis and friends said. “One of the themes of Rosh Hashanah suggests that very righteous people would die at the very end of the year because they were needed until the very end,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which has been giving wall-to-wall coverage of RBG’s death, encapsulated why the mourning for Ginsburg has been so intense — because the justice “had come to represent the liberal American feminist spirit for so many.”

JTA asked Jewish leaders around the country what their congregants were doing when the news came through.

(Durham, N.C. Rabbi Matt) Soffer’s tribute was among countless salutes made by rabbis and Jewish community members this weekend as the news of Ginsburg’s death broke over Jewish communities like a wave in the first moments of the Jewish New Year, or the last moments of the one that was just ending.

In some parts of the country, many synagogues had already launched their Rosh Hashanah services on Zoom and many families had already sat down for a holiday meal when the alert came.


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It's more 'Dog Bites Man' as religion-haunted 2020 campaign lurches into the fall

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It's more 'Dog Bites Man' as religion-haunted 2020 campaign lurches into the fall

GetReligion regulars will know that “Man Bites Dog” is news and “Dog Bites Man” is not.

This hoary journalism incantation came to mind at the close of the Democratic National Convention when 353 clergy and lay believers announced that they “choose hope over fear” and will mobilize religious voters so the Biden-Harris ticket can “lead us in restoring our nation’s values.”

Reporters will assess this for themselves, but to The Guy the Trump-biting endorsers of “Faith2020” (contact 657–333– 5391) look pretty much as predictable as the religious lineup boosting Trump-Pence. Faith2020 draws hallelujahs from former presidential nominee Al Gore, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Signers include workers for past Democratic candidates, abortion choice, LGBTQ concerns and various liberal causes.

In other words, it’s a familiar Religious Left all-star team.

Signer Jack Moline co-chaired Rabbis for Obama and is president of the Interfaith Alliance, founded in 1994 to counter the “Religious Right.” Despite continual hopes, building a politically potent Religious Left has proven elusive in an era when the big news (calling scholar John C. Green) is the emergence of non-religious Americans as a massive chunk of the Democrats’ constituency.

One sort-of surprise endorser is John Phelan, former president of the Evangelical Covenant Church’s North Park Theological Seminary. He joins alongside Faith2020 Executive Director Adam Phillips, whose former Portland, Oregon, church was forced out of that denomination in 2015 over LGBTQ inclusion in church leadership.

Other Faith2020 names of note: Frederick Davie (Faith2020 chair and executive vice president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary), David Beckman (former president of Bread for the World), Amos Brown (Kamala Harris’s San Francisco Baptist pastor), Amy Butler (removed last year as pastor of New York’s prominent Riverside Church), Joshua DuBois (who ran President Barack Obama’s “Faith-Based” partnerships office), Wesley Granberg-Michaelson (retired general secretary of the Reformed Church in America), Gene Robinson (whose elevation as a partnered gay bishop further split the global Anglican Communion), Brian McLaren (godfather of the “emerging church” movement), Talib Shareef (D.C. imam who leads what’s called “The Nation’s Mosque”), Ron Sider (Evangelicals for Social Action chair and Hillary Clinton endorser) and Simran Jeet Singh (Sikh chaplain at New York University).


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Democrats embrace interfaith America, while a few DNC caucuses cut 'under God' from pledge

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Did the Democrats “get” religion or not?

Certainly, lots of headlines coming out of this week’s virtual Democratic National Convention had strong faith elements.

But a different storyline gained attention, too.

The words “under God” were left out of the Pledge of Allegiance at the DNC’s Muslim Delegates & Allies Assembly and its LGBT Caucus Meeting, as first reported by David Brody, the Christian Broadcasting Network’s chief political analyst.

“NOT the way to win rust belt culturally centered Dems,” Brody tweeted.

Victor Morton of the Washington Times noted:

The phrase was not part of the Pledge when Congress first officially codified it in 1942 (it dates back in various forms to 1906). It was added in 1954 under a bill signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty … In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war,” Eisenhower wrote.

Brody stressed that when reciting the Pledge during main sessions, the Democrats said the words “under God.”

But the exclusion of those words by certain Democratic caucuses, he suggested, harkened back to 2012 when Democrats came under fire for removing “God” from the party platform. At the request of then-President Barack Obama, the party reversed that decision.

Eight years later, former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign — in what Biden calls “a battle for the soul of America” — has put an emphasis on winning over religious voters.


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NPR affiliate dumps Jewish meteorologist who compares Seattle to Kristallnacht

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When it comes to freedom of speech, journalists are in a tough place these days.

Yes, you are free to vent your views on social media, but should you? Those of us who covered regular beats in the past were told to not air our private views about some of the major players on our Facebook and Twitter feeds.

We were even coached to not place so much as a bumpersticker on our car that advertised our leanings — on anything –- one way or another. For instance, if a reporter covering a crisis pregnancy clinic pulled up to the interview with a Planned Parenthood sticker on her rear bumper, the CPC folks would have every right to conclude they would not get professional, objective treatment.

But if the reporter was a columnist, all bets were off, as he or she was being paid to be opinionated. Which is why the latest weird outrage — National Public Radio firing a Seattle-area meteorologist because he likened the city’s recent riots to an anti-Semitic mob in 1938 Germany — makes no sense.

From the Seattle Times:

KNKX Public Radio announced … it was axing its long-running weather segment with meteorologist Cliff Mass after the University of Washington professor wrote a post on his own blog comparing some Seattle protesters to the early Nazi militia known as the Brownshirts.

Mass wrote that “Seattle has had it(s) Kristallnacht and the photos of what occurred during the past weeks are eerily similar to those of 80 years ago.”

Kristallnacht was a pogrom carried out by the Nazis in 1938 that is widely seen as a precursor to the Holocaust, a turning point in Germany when social, political and economic persecution of Jewish people turned physical.

“We abhor the comparison and find it sensationalized and misleading — it does not reflect who we are and what we stand for at KNKX,” the radio station wrote on its website.

Aren’t college professors supposed to have opinions? Note that this was on Mass’s own personal blog.

Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the UW, said Friday morning that he was “stunned by the reaction. It exploded in a way I was stunned by.”

He said Friday morning, and wrote in a comment on his blog post Thursday night, that he wasn’t referring broadly to all protesters, just referring to people who destroyed property. “I compared those DOING VIOLENCE to Brownshirts,” he wrote in an email to The Seattle Times.


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The unorthodox life of Kamala Harris: The future of interfaith American politics?

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Hang on for a wild ride.

Try to avoid whiplash.

Yes, it was another crazy week in the world of religion news and we’re going to cover the highlights in a hurry.

Starting with the obvious: Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s selection of U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate brings plenty of faith angles.

Elana Schor, the national religion and politics writer for The Associated Press, notes that the 55-year-old Harris “attended services at both a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple growing up — an interfaith background that reflects her historic status as the first Black woman and woman of South Asian descent on a major-party presidential ticket.”

Bob Smietana, editor-in-chief of Religion News Service, dubs Harris “the interfaith candidate,” and RNS national correspondent Yonat Shimron offers “five faith facts about Biden’s VP choice.” In a separate story, Shimron suggests that Harris “is also the future of American religion.”

But the crucial angles related to Harris and religion aren’t all positive, even if some news coverage is. Can you say “Knights of Columbus”?

Her selection prompted the National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis to write about what DeSanctis’ article called “Kamala Harris’s Anti-Catholic Bigotry.” Even before the Harris pick, Kelsey Dallas, the Deseret News’ national religion writer, had reported last week on Biden’s “tough road ahead on religious freedom.”


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What's a hot take on Israel worth? Depends on one's media celebrity status (Hello Seth Rogen)

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How do you tell the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist?

Easy. The pessimist says, “Things just can’t get any worse. The optimist says, “Sure they can.”

Well, they certainly have — as far as the fraught connection between Israel and liberal American Jews goes.

The latest stressor is a predictably nasty media exchange over high-profile liberal commentator Peter Beinart’s recent declaration that he no longer backs a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A single bi-national, or perhaps a confederated, state, said Beinart, is the best remaining equitable option. This, he concluded, is because of Israel’s deeply entrenched West Bank settlement project. Further undermining the two-state option, he said, is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat to annex much of the occupied West Bank that Palestinians want to include in their own independent state.

Beinart detailed his thoughts in this New York Times oped and, in much greater detail, in this Jewish Currents essay.

For liberal Jews — who have long argued that two independent states coexisting side by side, one Jewish-run and one Palestinian, is the best and only realistic option — Beinart’s abandonment of full Jewish nationhood was nothing less than Zionist heresy.

Naturally, given today’s insatiable 24/7 media universe — in which all who dare venture are but a tweet away from “woke” fame or “cancel culture” renunciation — the verbal warfare started immediately.

Beinart’s, you may be wondering, is but one voice in a cacophony of voices claiming to know what’s best for Israel-Palestine, so why the fuss? Moreover, he lives in the United States, not Israel, so to what degree does his opinion even matter?

The answer, of course, is his American media prominence. His frequent talking-head appearances, (he’s a CNN regular) and voluminous writings have won him a place in the liberal Zionist media firmament, where he’s long been a harsh critic of Netanyahu and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. That’s not Hollywood famous, but it’s a start.


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