A gay reverend has gone viral for his sassy response to a hater who questioned how he could possibly teach Christianity while also sleeping with men–and the reverend’s replies are priceless.
Daniel Brereton, a reverend at St. John’s Dixie Anglican Church in Mississauga, Ontario, shared a tweet containing screenshots of a text exchange he had with an unidentified crank.
“WTF?” the crank began, “How can someone who has sex with men teach people about the Bible?”
Brereton responded, “Sex with ‘men’? The reports of my sex life have been greatly exaggerated.”
Unamused, the hater responded, “Even one man is a sin.”
The reverend wrote back, “You must know my ex.”
The hater then wrote, “You can’t teach the word of God while having sex with men.”
The reverend then sent off a million-dollar retort.
“Are you speaking from experience?” he wrote. “Personally, I’ve never tried doing them at the same time. But I suppose if your camera was stable enough, and your partner quiet enough, and the people in your study group didn’t mind…”
Whoa… Brereton might’ve stumbled onto a hot new kink. We’re not sure if any adult video performers or OnlyFans creators have ever tried combining humping, web-camping, and Bible study, but surely there’s an audience for it — it just seems so… sacre-licious.
Undeterred, the hater replied, “I don’t understand all the people so deceived by you. As a Christian, I would never follow you.”
The reverend accurately responded, “As a Christian, you’re supposed to be following Jesus.”
The hater responded, “At least I don’t f*ck dudes,”
Brereton shot back, “On behalf of every gay man on earth. Thank you.” The shaaaaaade.
“F*ck you,” the hater dumbly responded.
The good rev then clowned the hater, writing back, “Ok, you JUST said you wouldn’t. You’re sending a lot of mixed signals here.”
After that zinger, the hater apparently blocked the reverend from sending him any other messages.
“Well, he finally sent me a clear signal,” Brereton wrote on his tweet containing shots of the exchange. His tweet has gotten over 55K likes as of Wednesday morning.
It’s unclear how the reverend at the hater connected or why the hater seemed so angry yet thirsty for the good rev, but the man of the cloth certainly cut his opponent to shreds.
With his wit (and admittedly good looks), Rev. Brereton is the sort of religious leader we need more of. This exchange is pure gold, but Brereton’s Twitter is also filled with tweets standing up for queer dignity and correcting the misperception that it’s impossible to be gay and Christian.
Haters regularly interpret the Bible to condemn queers (while ignoring its prohibitions against divorce, hypocrisy, and allowing poverty). But most of the Bible’s condemnations against homosexuality are part of ancient Hebrew law which contains prohibitions against shrimp, blended fabrics, and other things that most Christians ignore. Christians also seem to ignore the parts where Jesus stresses the importance of loving literally everyone, whether they’re Christian or not.
Brereton could’ve been much meaner to his hater or ignored him completely. But instead, by standing up for himself, he showed everyone that gay people don’t need to accept shaming from people who claim to speak for God.
“Jesus does say ‘don’t respond to violence with violence,’” the reverend pointed out in another tweet, “but he does NOT tell people to be door mats. He raises the oppressed up into full dignity, he doesn’t tell them they’re earning ‘heaven points’ with every physical and emotional bruise they sustain. Nope.”
Put another way: Stand up to religious bigotry. Jesus and the good reverend command it!
Michael Anderson (left), a survivor of Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs, and Matthew Haynes, a founding owner of the club, in a Congressional hearing on anti-LGBTQ+ extremism Wednesday.Tom Williams/Getty Images
Two sides swiftly emerged at Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on anti-LGBTQ+ violence: one that was ready to talk about our community’s rights and protections, and another that just wanted to blame the woke left.
The special hearing on “The Rise of Anti-LGBTQI+ Extremism and Violence in the United States” was assembled in direct response to the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs by a far-right extremist which left five dead. But while the witnesses and Democrats discussed the issue at hand, which outgoing committee chair Carolyn Maloney called “one of the most pressing issues that our nation will face in the years to come,” Republicans focused their efforts on turning anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes into just a symptom of an alleged wave of violent crime, blaming everything from Black Lives Matter and efforts to defund the police to poor border security and fentanyl.
Witnesses at the hearing included Michael Anderson and James Slaugh, two Club Q survivors; Club Q owner Matthew Haynes; and Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the PULSE shooting, all of whom gave impassioned testimony about their experiences, trauma, and hope for the future. “Hate speech turns into hate action, and actions based on hate almost took my life from me at 25 years old,” Anderson told the committee. Wolf echoed the sentiment, calling out “cynical politicians and greedy grifters” like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who willfully “pour gasoline on anti-LGBTQ hysteria” to make money and accumulate political capital.
Haynes, who said attending the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act on Tuesday was “the first joy and pride I have felt since these horrific events at Club Q,” bluntly shared with the committee several examples of anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech he’d received since the shooting. The messages were filled with slurs, professing happiness that five people were dead and disappointment the killer hadn’t shot more.
“I ask you today not simply what are you doing to safeguard LGBTQ Americans,” Haynes said, “but rather what are you and other leaders doing to make America unsafe for LGBTQ people.”
Witnesses also included Human Rights Campaign president Kelly Robinson, who called hate-motivated violence like the Club Q shooting “the tragic result of a society that devalues our lives, particularly the lives of Black and brown transgender and gender-nonconforming people.” Most of the witnesses stressed that Republicans’ fearmongering and misinformation around trans people and drag performers in particular directly emboldened open violence on hospitals, libraries, and on the street.
But Republicans brought one witness of their own to frame their points — Charles Lehman, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which has long pushed for policies like “broken window” policing that harm marginalized communities. Lehman was on hand not to talk about anti-LGBTQ+ violence in any specific capacity, but to generally advocate for more police funding and harsher federal hate crime penalties, “bringing the full power of the justice system to bear” on offenders.
Lehman’s testimony was an obvious overture to what Republicans really wanted to talk about, the same talking point they’d stressed throughout this year’s midterm campaigns: that violent crime is allegedly on the rise, and it’s actually the Democrats’ fault any of this happened. Kentucky Rep. James Comer, the incoming committee chair who literally opened his remarks with the phrase “thoughts and prayers,” squarely blamed left-wing “defund the police and soft-on-crime policies” for a general rise in violence he denied is unique to LGBTQ+ communities.
“We should be focused on the alarming rise of violent crime across our country, crimes that target all races and ethnicities,” Comer said, citing elevated homicide numbers in several large cities. Recent analyses from both the Bureau of Justice Statistics and FBI show that while homicide rates have increased during the pandemic, there was no national increase in overall violent crime over the last three years.
Comer, of course, has a motive for obfuscating culpability: he’s one co-sponsor of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “Protect Children’s Innocence” bill, currently in committee, which would make providing a minor with any gender-affirming care a felony and prohibit federal funds from paying for such care.
On Friday, Club Q family and supporters fundraised to reopen the nightlife haven at the center of the Colorado Springs shooting.
Other Republicans followed suit, like Pennsylvania Rep. Fred Keller, who said the committee should be “looking at this holistically as an American crime crisis.” Jody Hice of Georgia, in his last committee meeting as a representative, equated anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech to Maxine Waters’ 2018 comments encouraging people to make then-current Trump administration officials “not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Pat Fallon of Texas, aggressively questioning Wolf, invited comparison to James Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders supporter who shot Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and four others in 2017. “None of us blamed Bernie Sanders because he didn’t do it,” Fallon told Wolf, clearly agitated. In fact, some Republicans including then-President Trump did blame Sanders and other Democrats for allegedly inciting the shooting.
David Cicilline, co-chair of the House Equality Caucus, said he was “disappointed, but not surprised” that almost no Republicans asked the witnesses about anti-LGBTQ+ extremism. “Republicans are happy to discuss our community when they’re attacking our rights, when they’re crying on the House floor because they oppose marriage equality,” Cicilline pointed out during the hearing. “But when it comes to actually discussing the violence against our community and its causes, just a quick condemnation of what happened at Club Q, and violence broadly, and nothing more.
Trump-appointed Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk at his Senate confirmation hearing in 2019. Courtesy of Senate Judiciary Committee
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
On Thursday evening, a Trump-appointed judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk effectively ordered the Biden administration to reinstate a harsh, Trump-era border policy known as “Remain in Mexico,” which requires many immigrants seeking asylum in the United States to remain on the Mexican side of the border while their case is being processed. It’s the second time that Kacsmaryk has pulled this stunt — he did the same thing in 2021, and the Supreme Court overturned his decision last June.
It’s a significant decision in its own right, and will only prolong uncertainty at America’s southern border. But Kacsmaryk’s order in this case, Texas v. Biden, was merely the capstone of an unusually busy week for this judge. His busy week, and months of earlier actions, show the havoc one rogue federal judge can create, especially in today’s judiciary.
The previous Thursday, Kacsmaryk became the first federal judge since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion to attack the right to contraception.
Kacsmaryk’s decision in Deanda v. Becerra targets Title X, a federal program that provides grants to health providers to fund family planning and contraceptive care. He claimed that the program is unlawful because it doesn’t require grant recipients to get parental permission before treating teenage patients. Lest there be any doubt, his opinion is riddled with obvious legal errors. Kacsmaryk didn’t even have jurisdiction to hear the Deanda case in the first place.
Meanwhile, in mid-November, Kacsmaryk handed down another decision in Neese v. Becerra, which held that a federal law prohibiting certain forms of discrimination by health providers does not protect against anti-LGBTQ discrimination. His opinion cannot be squared with the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which established that statutes prohibiting “sex” discrimination also ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, because “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates are holding their breath waiting for Kacsmaryk to decide Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, a case asking him to force the FDA to withdraw its approval of mifepristone, a drug used to induce an enormous percentage of all abortions in the United States. Given Kacsmaryk’s record, it would be shocking if he does not issue such an order — regardless of whether he has any plausible legal basis for doing so.
And Kacsmaryk is just as fixated on what straight people are doing in their bedrooms. In a 2015 article, Kacsmaryk denounced a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”
Yet, thanks to an obscure rule governing which federal judges are assigned to hear cases in Texas federal courts — 95 percent of civil cases filed in Amarillo, Texas’s federal courthouse are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk — this prurient man is now one of the most powerful public officials in the United States. Any conservative interest group can find a federal policy they do not like, file a legal complaint in the Amarillo federal courthouse challenging that policy, and nearly guarantee that their case will be heard by Kacsmaryk.
Kacsmaryk’s opinions are embarrassingly poorly reasoned — including his latest Remain in Mexico one
Many of Kacsmaryk’s decisions are so poorly reasoned that they can be rebutted in just a couple of sentences.
His opinion in Neese, for example, concludes that a statute prohibiting discrimination “on the basis of sex” does not prohibit LGBTQ discrimination. But, again, the holding of Bostock was that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
Similarly, one of the many problems with Kacsmaryk’s Deanda decision is that it violates the constitutional requirement that federal courts may only hear a challenge to a federal policy if the person bringing a lawsuit has been injured in some way by that policy. The plaintiff challenging Title X in Deanda is a father who does not claim that he has ever sought Title X-funded care, does not allege that his daughters have ever sought Title X-funded care, and who doesn’t even claim that they intend to seek such care in the future.
Often, Kacsmaryk’s opinions suggest not only that he knows he is defying the law, but also that he revels in doing so. His opinion in Neese, for example, opens with a quote from Justice Samuel Alito’s dissenting opinion in Bostock. A dissent, by definition, is not the law. Indeed, it is often the opposite of the law, because dissenting opinions state arguments that a majority of the Court rejected.
Or consider his two decisions in the Texas case. The first time the Remain in Mexico program was before Kacsmaryk, he claimed that a federal law known as Section 1225 only gives “the government two options vis-à-vis aliens seeking asylum: 1) mandatory detention; or 2) return to a contiguous territory.”
The Supreme Court identified multiple problems with this reasoning. Among other things, Kacsmaryk ignored that federal law explicitly gives the government more than two options, including the option to “parole into the United States” an immigrant seeking admission to this country “for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” According to the Supreme Court, Kacsmaryk also engaged in “unwarranted judicial interference in the conduct of foreign policy,” because his opinion effectively forced the United States government to bargain with Mexico in order to reinstate the Remain in Mexico policy.
Kacsmaryk’s second Texas decision interferes with US foreign policy no less than the first, because it effectively requires the Biden administration to go back to Mexico and seek its permission to reinstate a program that cannot operate without the Mexican government’s permission.
Similarly, Kacsmaryk’s latest decision puts a fair amount of weight on the fact that the Supreme Court assumed, without deciding, that “the dissent’s interpretation of [section 1225] is correct” with respect to one provision that both Alito’s Texas dissent and Kacsmaryk’s first Texas decision read to mandate that certain immigrants must be detained. But the reason why the Court made this assumption is to emphasize that, even if Kacsmaryk had read this provision of the statute correctly, that still did not justify reinstating Remain in Mexico. Indeed, the Supreme Court labeled the dissent’s interpretation of section 1225 as a whole “practically self-refuting.”
Kacsmaryk also spends much of his opinion faulting the government for not providing a fuller explanation of why the Biden administration decided to end the Remain in Mexico program in an October 29, 2021 memo. Although this memo spends three pages discussing “the concerns of states and border communities,” for example, Kacsmaryk claims that the administration failed “to adequately consider costs to States and their reliance interests.”
It is true that, in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents (2020), the Supreme Court held that the federal government must explain the “reasoned decisionmaking” it used to justify changing one of its policies. But the Court also emphasized that judges should apply a “narrow standard of review” when assessing if a memorandum explaining a new policy is adequate, and should “assess only whether the decision was ‘based on a consideration of the relevant factors and whether there has been a clear error of judgment.’”
Instead, Kacsmaryk nitpicks the October memo, faulting it for things like failing to perform a “cost-benefit analysis,” or for not giving enough weight to the degree to which the Remain in Mexico program might deter asylum seekers from arriving at the border.
But if Regents permits this kind of granular judicial criticism of a new policy’s justification, then no federal policy can ever be changed. There will always be some study that the federal government could have conducted, but didn’t, before announcing a shift in its approach. And there will always be some argument for maintaining the status quo that the government either didn’t mention in its memo justifying the new policy, or did not discuss at as much length as it could have.
Kacsmaryk has gotten away with this behavior because his judicial superiors let him
Kacsmaryk is able to behave this way in no small part because his decisions appeal to the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a reactionary court dominated by Republican appointees, many of whom share his flexible approach to judicial decision-making.
But he also gets away with his behavior because the Supreme Court provides only the most cursory supervision of Kacsmaryk, even when a majority of the justices determine that the Trump judge mangled the law.
Shortly after Kacsmaryk issued his first decision ordering the administration to reinstate Remain in Mexico, the Supreme Court rejected the government’s request to temporarily block the decision while the case was being litigated. It then left Kacsmaryk’s ruling in place for 10 months, before ultimately ruling that he had misread the law.
Even then, however, the Supreme Court’s Texas decision left the question of whether the October 29 memo adequately explained the administration’s reasoning for ending the Remain in Mexico program undecided. And then it sent the case back down to Kacsmaryk to resolve this question. Given Kacsmaryk’s record, the justices who decided the Texas case must have known how he would rule on that question.
If the Supreme Court follows this same pattern again, it may be 2024 before the justices get around to reversing Kacsmaryk’s second Texas decision. That would mean that, for nearly half of President Joe Biden’s current term in office, Kacsmaryk will have effectively wielded what should have been the Biden administration’s power to decide US border policy.
The Texas federal courts’ unusual case assignment process, which allows so many litigants to choose Kacsmaryk as their judge, bears much of the blame for the enormous power he wields. Ultimately, however, the best safeguard against rogue judges is an appellate system where higher-ranking judges act in good faith — and in a timely manner — to review lower courts’ decisions and reverse them when necessary.
That system has now broken down. And that means that Kacsmaryk can act as king almost any time someone files a legal complaint in his Amarillo courthouse.
As this article makes clear the Proud Boys are the Hitler Brownshirts of our time. The right wing group is to force people to follow the wishes of the right by threats of violence and intimidation. It is domestic terrorism endorsed by the republicans. “While the Proud Boys used to largely host rallies where they were the headliners, now they come in to act as the muscle for other reactionary groups,” Southern Poverty Law Center senior research analyst Cassie Miller explained. Hugs
The far-right extremist group’s shift in focus reflects the GOP’s renewed attacks on the LGBTQ+ community.
Far-right extremist group the Proud Boys abruptly shifted their focus to anti-LGBTQ+ action in mid-2022. According to a new report from Vice News, the violent all-male, neo-fascist group’s involvement in anti-LGBTQ+ protests tripled this year compared to 2021.
The data comes from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) as well as Vice’s own tracking of Proud Boys activity, which found that 100 percent of anti-LGBTQ+ actions involving the gang took place between late May and December of this year.
The shift reflects a new tactic following the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Local chapters of the decentralized group have since been forging alliances with other right-wing activists in their communities around culture war issues like anti-vaccine efforts, abortion, masking mandates, and so-called parental rights in education.
“While the Proud Boys used to largely host rallies where they were the headliners, now they come in to act as the muscle for other reactionary groups,” Southern Poverty Law Center senior research analyst Cassie Miller explained.
As baseless attacks labeling the LGBTQ+ community as “groomers” and “pedophiles” have increased this year, so has the Proud Boys’ involvement in anti-LGBTQ+ protests. As Vice reports, members of the gang in at least 11 states showed up at libraries and restaurants hosting drag queen story hours and drag brunches. According to the ACLED, 20 percent of all demonstrations involving Proud Boys since 2020 have turned violent, and members of the group are increasingly likely to be armed.
Most recently, 50 Proud Boys, many of them armed and wearing combat gear, showed up alongside members of other far-right hate groups at a church in Columbus, Ohio, where a holiday drag queen story hour event was scheduled to take place earlier this month.
Increasing Proud Boys activity in the South and Southwest seems to have coincided with increased anti-LGBTQ+ activism from so-called “parental rights” groups and Christian nationalists. “Where these groups have popped up around the country this year, the Proud Boys have followed,” said Southern Poverty Law Center’s Miller.
Miller said that the group appears to be acting “in lockstep” with the GOP and right-wing media in its focus on the LGBTQ+ community.
Even more troublingly, some Proud Boys chapters have apparently made inroads to political legitimacy in their local communities through charity work. ACLED director of communications Sam Jones said this may be a tactic meant to “deepen connections with an existing base in the community, expand local networks, recruit, and draw lines separating the potentially allied in-groups they aim to ‘protect’ from the demonized out-groups that they target.”
This bill is the 3rd one in a week in the state. This one wont pass, but by constantly pushing them the republicans are making it much more likely they will get bans past. This is about eliminating trans people. Stop kids from transitioning then restrict medical access for adults until the ability to live openly as the gender you really are is impossible. It is a short article but it shows the true goal is the same as the don’t say gay laws in Florida, to eliminate gay or trans kids from schools and promote hatred against the LGBTQI+. The right and the Christian nationalist are making it clear what they want, all advances in society rolled back. The improvements in social understanding they want undone, gone. Hugs
“We have been saying a slow moving genocide targeted at eliminating transgender people through eliminating gender affirming care is happening.”
“We have been saying a slow moving genocide targeted at eliminating transgender people through eliminating gender affirming care is happening,” she added. “It continues.”
Some commenters noted their belief that the bill is unlikely to pass, but that it is nonetheless horrific it was even proposed.
The bill’s title seems to define gender-affirming care as a type of conversion therapy, which is banned in New Hampshire. It states that the bill seeks to prohibit “gender transition procedures for minors and young adults, relative to sex and gender in public schools, and relative to the definition of conversion therapy.”
The harmful and widely condemned practice of conversion therapy – in which so-called therapists try to force LGBTQ+ people into being straight and cisgender – is the exact opposite of gender-affirming care, which affirms people’s identities.
This week, South Carolina also introduced two bills targeting gender-affirming care for trans youth and young adults.
The bills seek to ban gender-affirming care for anyone under age 21 and make it more challenging to obtain for those over 21.
“South Carolina’s anti-trans legislation goes extremely far,” wrote Reed on her blog, “and South Carolina is now high on my list of states that could join the ‘worst of the worst’ deep red states on my transgender legislative risk map.”
So the law accomplished what they wanted, the LGBTQI+ students are not protected, they are free to be targeted for being preyed on, and they will now be afraid to be out or themselves but instead will stay in the closet hidden from the rest of the kids. Is this the society of an entire state in 2022, the default position of 1950? How did we in Florida regress so far so fast. The entire LGBTQI+ population of Florida just lost legal standing in schools. The students with two same sex parents are the same as bastard child had out of wedlock in the 1950. They are not allowed to mention their families or do family events. How is this protecting the children? I am worried that this drive my sweep the country in the red states. DeathSantis is so driven to become president he will hurt anyone and everyone to get there. Ron and I disagree if DeathSantis is a true Christian Nationalist of just pandering to them, but either way the result is the same. Hugs
OT: Tomorrow I will write a post about what happened this week starting with Wednesday. But today my pain levels will barely let me sit at my desk. I have spent most of my day on the bed trying to get my spine to stop sending pain signals to my brain that something is tearring my body apart. Hugs
Ten county school districts were put on notice last month that some of their policies and procedures “may not comport with Florida law.”
On Wednesday, Florida’s State Board of Education got an update on progress among school district’s flagged for noncompliance with the state’s Don’t Say Gay law.
Ten county school districts were put on notice last month that some of their policies and procedures “may not comport with Florida law” and were directed to bring their districts into compliance.
The board learned several districts among the ten pulled LGBTQ+ support guides, two passed new regulations banning trans kids from using the restrooms and locker rooms of their gender, and one threw out half of its equity statement addressing racism.
With those rollbacks, board members — all appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis — were satisfied.
“Ultimately we found that these districts are in compliance with the law,” said board chair Tom Grady.
The Parental Rights in Education Act, passed in March, went into effect in September. The law prohibits instruction and discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade and restricts those discussions in higher grades.
It’s had a chilling effect on LGBTQ+ teachers, students, and speech of all kinds.
The school districts flagged for non-compliance were Alachua, Broward, Brevard, Duval, Hillsborough, Indian River, Leon, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, plus the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind.
In the hearing, Grady warned superintendents they could still be subject to lawsuits by parents as they instituted changes. Broward County reported it would take until March 31, 2023 to roll back policies to bring the district into compliance.
“I think it’s clear to me that not only Broward, but other districts have a pretty significant incentive to move as quickly as possible, certainly prior to March 31, in order to revise those procedures to avoid that type of a challenge,” Grady said.
Chairman Grady also took the opportunity at Wednesday’s meeting to congratulate the DeSantis-appointed board for an award by the right-leaning Center for Education Reform, which endorsed and lobbied for the Don’t Say Gay legislation at the center of their agenda.
“I think this is a good time to just very quickly note, Florida has ranked Number 1 in the nation for parents’ involvement in education,” Grady said, “and that’s really what this item is about.”
Last week, the author of the Don’t Say Gay law, Republican state Rep. Joseph Harding, was indicted on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements, and resigned his seat in the Florida legislature.
An atheist group wants the Greenville Public Schools to stop giving pastors veto power over books (screenshot via YouTube)
Reading Time: 4MINUTES
The Board of Trustees for the Greenville County Schools in South Carolina wants clergy members to be able to review what books are appropriate for public school students, and they may face a legal challenge if they go through with it.
Recently, there’s been a push by conservative school boards to ban books deemed inappropriate for kids; their idea of what’s inappropriate boils down to books that mention LGBTQ people or sex unless fire and brimstone are included as a consequence.
Last May, for example, the Greenville County Schools Board of Trustees voted to ban a book called Melissa, about a trans girl, from all elementary schools in the district. Middle school students would need parental permission to check it out.
The people who make those kinds of suggestions to the board sit on a “Materials Review Committee.” The group judges the appropriateness of material across the curriculum, but the books are where all the action is at these days.
In August, the Board announced that it was accepting applications from anyone interested in joining that committee for a three-year term. But their announcement raised eyebrows because they specifically said clergy members would be included in the mix:
At the elementary school level, the committee will be comprised of three parents with children enrolled in Greenville county elementary schools, four district elementary school teachers from different grade levels, one district elementary school media specialist, one member of the clergy and two non-employees of the school district.
At the middle school level, the committee will be comprised of three parents with children enrolled in Greenville County middle schools, three district middle school teachers from different subject areas, one district middle school media specialist, one member of the clergy, and two non-employees of the school district.
At the high school level, the committee will be comprised of three parents with children enrolled in Greenville County high schools, three district high school teachers from different subject areas; one high school media specialist, one member of the clergy, and two non-employees of the school district.
What the hell would a clergy member add to the discussion? Who cares what pastors think about a particular book? Why is leading a church a prerequisite for a seat on this committee but not leading a non-profit that helps kids struggling with mental health?
“It’s a very clear violation of the establishment clause,” said Marcus Corder, parent of a student at Lake Forest Elementary. “It makes me wonder what type of clergy have had the power over the decision of taxpayers’ money over the years.”
Corder, who said he also attended Lake Forest as a child, wants clergy removed from the committees.
“It’s a further erosion of the separation of church and state,” Corder said.
According to the Greenville News, though, the inclusion of clergy members for these committees is mandated by the state:
Requirement of clergy on the advisory committees comes from the state’s Comprehensive Health Education Act of 1988, which was passed to assist in selecting curriculum components and materials, according to [executive director of academic innovation and technology Charlotte] McDavid. Every school district in South Carolina uses such a committee, McDavid said.
If that’s the case, then this isn’t a problem with the school board. It would be a problem with state law. But it turns out that’s not actually true.
In a letter the Freedom From Religion Foundation just sent to the Greenville County Schools, their decision to put clergy members on the Materials Review Committee is their choice, not a state law, because the law restricts the inclusion of clergy members to committees reviewing “reproductive health education, family life education, and pregnancy prevention education.”
So… not books. Certainly not books by or about LGBTQ people. To be clear, clergy members should not have a say in health education either. It’s an awful, potentially illegal, law as well. But it’s a separate issue that’s not currently up for debate.
The bottom line is that FFRF says this is the school board’s problem to fix if they want to avoid a lawsuit.
According to a local news source, the District claims the inclusion of clergy on the committees is required by South Carolina’s Comprehensive Health Education Act of 1988 (“CHEA”). However, the CHEA provides that material review committees “assist in the selection of components and curriculum materials” for “instructional materials addressing the subjects of reproductive health education, family life education, and pregnancy prevention education.” In contrast, the District’s committees are not assisting in the initial selection of curriculum materials nor are the committees focused on subjects related to reproductive health education, family life education, or pregnancy prevention education. Instead, the District’s Materials Review Committees address complaints, and these complaints may be about any and all District materials, not just materials regarding health education.
Since the law is specific regarding what materials they can cover, FFRF says the clergy members have to go in this particular case.
The District must eliminate the clergy member positions from each Materials Review Committee. It is inappropriate and unconstitutional for a public school district to create special positions for religious leaders.
The Greenville County Schools should take this seriously given that this isn’t their first run-in with the church/state separation crowd. In 2020, after a six-year legal battle over Christian prayers at their graduation ceremonies, the same school district lost the case and had to pay the American Humanist Association $187,000 in legal fees.
That’s going to be the outcome here as well. Clergy members, in and of themselves, have nothing of value to offer public schools when it comes to what books should be available to kids. If they have some kind of special knowledge in that arena, then that should be what they emphasize. That’s all that matters.
“A woman who calls herself “Patriot Barbie” dressed up as a cat and went to a school board meeting in a bizarre attempt to humiliate a transgender teacher.
“I am a cat,” Lindsey Graham – not the U.S. senator but the conservative host of the podcast Patriot Barbie – said at a Liberty Elementary School District meeting in Arizona, while licking her hand.
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Proud BoysPhoto: Shutterstock
Photo: Shutterstock
Photo: Shutterstock
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