On the evening of April 18, various transphobic and racist remarks were spotted scrawled in chalk around Grounds. Many of the students who stumbled across the statements sought to scuff them out or erase them, only to see them rewritten during the course of the night. One of these statements even read, “Confused about your gender? Look down your pants.” Another message explained the wealth gap “through alleged average IQ differences between white and black people.” The racist notion that there are inherent intelligence disparities between ethnicities was originally introduced by Arthur Jensen, “the father of modern academic racism,” who wrote an article in 1969 titled “How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?” In the article, he claimed that a nebulous “g” or genetic factor explained the differences in scholastic achievement between white and black students. Jensen was heavily bankrolled by — in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center — the “racist radical right,” or RRR, and his writings were used as arguments against integration.
Today, the first “R” in the RRR has changed from overtly “racist” to “religious,” but it is equally strong and equally terrifying: an extremist conservative class that attempts to use the cross to ward off measures that promote acceptance and tolerance, as though the ACLU and other civil liberties groups were vampires. Recently, in March 2016, a month after Charlotte, N.C., passed measures protecting LGBT customers from discrimination, the state legislature nullified them by passing a statewide non-discrimination ordinance. Legislators called it the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, which provides “statewide protections [that] cover race, religion, color, national origin and biological sex — but not sexual orientation or gender identity.” At the core of the argument against Charlotte’s law was ostensibly the issue of bathrooms: the measures therein would have allowed transgender people “to use the bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity.”
The RRR in North Carolina, which has had a GOP-controlled legislature since 2010 and a Republican governorship since 2012, believes that transgender restroom use “endangers privacy or creates a threat of sexual assault,” violating the conservative “common sense” gender binary. Clearly, it’s not just about bathrooms. The RRR has unfortunately equated “freedom of conscience” with freedom of intolerance by framing laws permitting discrimination against the LGBT community as affirmations of the exercise of religions freedom.
North Carolina’s Public Facilities Act is akin to Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Georgia’s proposed “Free Exercise Protection Act,” both of which create legal space to deny goods and services to members of the LGBT community as a means of “restoring” or “protecting” religious freedom. There are numerous states with such laws: Mississippi was the most recent addition, ratifying House Bill 1532, also known as the “Protection of Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act.” It allows “people with religious objections to deny certain services to gay couples,” which is, in the words of governor Phil Bryant, who signed the bill, a central way in which “people of faith…exercise[e] their religious beliefs.” An analysis by Columbia Law School found the bill would make legal several ridiculous scenarios, including “a mental health counselor [refusing] to work with LGBT students…a government agency manager ... [requiring] female employees to wear skirts or dresses…[and] a religious university [firing] a single mother working in the cafeteria.”
The “Protection of Freedom of Conscience Act” prompted a response from SNL, which made a fake trailer for a movie titled “God is a Boob Man.” The trailer parodies the recently released “God’s Not Dead 2,” the second installment in a series about protecting religious freedom in America against “zealous civil liberties group[s]” and championing “God [in] the classroom—and the public square.”
SNL bitingly presented an increasingly popular view on what seems like a binary between affirmation of first amendment rights to religious freedom and tolerance, or a clash between the secular and the bigoted. The RRR is creating an association between religion and bigotry, which may be a factor in why 36 percent of those born between 1990 and 1996 identify as “unaffiliated” with any religion.
In my own experience, religion may cause people to disagree with certain practices or lifestyles of others, but it also underscores an empathy that emphasizes that in a free and democratic society, the right to eschew a set of practices must reconcile itself with the right of others to embrace them.
Religion is not inherently bad, but it is corrupted when wielded as a political tool. Chalk can be washed away. State laws, unfortunately, cannot. I do not know the motives of those who chalked bigoted messages on Grounds, but they serve as a reminder that although freedom of expression and belief is guaranteed in this country, we must fight against allowing perverse beliefs to gain power and a following.
Tamar Ziff is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at t.ziff@cavalierdaily.com.
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