A professor of law sent this Washington Post story to me, with the comment:

A suit to “Bob Jones” Christian schools—take away their tax exempt status for discriminating against LGBTQ students, just like what happened to Bob Jones U when it used to ban interracial dating. There are some technical legal problems (regarding standing to sue) for the private plaintiffs, but one wonders how much the Biden administration will resist.

What does the Post story say? Excerpts:

So York College has to have all federal funding taken away because queer demiboy wants to wear dresses to class, and his Christian school says no, you can’t do it. Great. This is what the Left fights for now.

From the profile of plaintiff Jake Picker, whose photo is at the top of this item:

Jake Picker lives in Waco, TX. He identifies as queer.

He attends Baylor University as a pre-med student and expects to graduate in May 2021 with a degree in Biology and Biochemistry. Baylor has several official anti-LGBTQ+ student policies, including stating, “Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm. Temptations to deviate from this norm include both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior.” This policy and others like it result in Jake feeling unsafe and unprotected at school.

So he can’t even name a single harm he suffered! He just feels “unsafe and unprotected.” Religious liberty should be taken from Baylor because this queer crybully chose to attend a Baptist university whose policies were perfectly clear before he filed his application, and because Christian teaching hurts his feelings. It’s infuriating.

These plaintiffs are not victims. They are crybullies. What they seek in this lawsuit is the end of exemptions to Title IX for religious schools. What this would mean is that religious schools would either have to change their policies on LGBT, or lose all federal funding. The crybullies and the progressives will not stop until they have crushed dissenting Christians.

The thing about the famous 1982 Bob Jones case is that SCOTUS held that the IRS can remove the tax-exempt status of a religious school because “[g]overnment has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education . . . which substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on [the University’s] exercise of their religious beliefs.” I’d like to hear the opinions of lawyers in this blog’s readership, but it seems to me that the Biden administration could simply announce a policy change at the IRS, and tax exemption for religious colleges and universities that discriminate against LGBTs would disappear.

Understand, though, that the Bob Jones case involved federal tax exemption, but the federal LGBT lawsuit would be even broader, taking away all federal funding from non-compliant schools.

It’s not enough that LGBT folks have nearly every university in the country. They’re going to smash the few Christians holdouts. Love wins through hatred.

UPDATE: A reader who is a professor writes:

Just read your blog on the assault on Christian colleges that received federal funding. In the profile of Hayden Brown that you cited from REAP’s website, I noticed something that caught my attention: the shift from masculine singular pronouns, to neutral plural pronouns, to feminine singular pronouns.

Visiting the REAP site, I confirmed that Brown’s profile was the first example of what I suspected would be the next trend in the pronoun wars. I have long wondered why, in citing preferred pronouns in email signatures and other places, people insist on citing 3 of them. In other words, why bother saying your pronouns are “he/him/his”? Wouldn’t it simply suffice to say “Pronouns: Masculine” or, even easier “He”? Wouldn’t the “him” and the “his” logically extend from the “he”?

My working hypothesis as a rhetorician (confirmed “in the wild” for the first time today), was that all 3 pronouns were necessary because eventually we would see a series of preferred pronouns that don’t match in terms of gender or number. You didn’t quote Mr. Brown’s (Ms.?) preferred pronouns in your blog, but the REAP site clarifies that they are “he/they/she”. In effect, Brown wants people to use masculine singular AND neutral plural AND feminine singular pronouns when referring to him/they/her. Nothing new under the sun, though, right? We already have 109 pronouns.

Well, here’s the problem. I assume that as a “queer demiboy” Brown is arguing that one can use any pronoun to refer to him/they/her. Fair enough. But what if someone makes a “mistake”? What if, instead of varying the pronouns to affirm Brown’s multifaceted identity, a speaker uses all singular feminine? Or what if a person uses plural neutral pronouns AND masculine singular, but forgets to use feminine singular, thereby refusing to acknowledge the feminine dimensions of Brown’s unique personhood?

My point here is simply this: one of the major arguments in favor of compelling people to comply with preferred pronouns is that to do so “Isn’t that difficult”. And maybe it ISN’T that difficult…when the pronouns that are “preferred” conform to linguistic norms that insist upon a uniformity in terms of gender and number. But in Brown’s case, we see where this is leading us: a set of conditions that actually breaks down the rules regarding gender and number in English usage. Leave aside whether such linguistic reforms are a good thing or a bad thing — one thing that they certainly do is make adhering the new guidelines very difficult for those who have internalized the rules of traditional usage. And since ANY failure or refusal to comply with one’s preferences regarding pronouns is now de facto evidence of an actionable attack on one’s being, it is pretty clear that we are right that the easy-breezy pronoun shift seems to be something of a trojan horse.

Just thought you would find this informative. Glad I finally found proof for my hypothesis.