Catholic institutions are being pushed into a new civil-rights framework, and it's becoming a regular slot in the local and national news cycles everywhere
The fight over Catholic institutions and gender ideology is being driven by a false comparison, fueled by moral equivalency that isn't really there, but is being manufactured and magnified. The equivalency is that gender ideology is the same moral issue as racial equality, and therefore demands the same respect, the same moral license, and the same assent, even from Catholic institutions.
Let's look at the latest cases, and then I'm going to lead you through the faulty logic. Because if rational people can't see what's going on in front of them, they're liable to fall for anything.
The Current Legal Sphere
We are seeing this more and more throughout the world, particularly in the Catholic world.
In Melbourne, a Catholic school is being sued by one of its own teachers, who identifies as nonbinary and asked the school to use a nonbinary title and pronouns. The school declined, saying the request conflicts with Catholic teaching about the human person. Now a court will decide whether a Catholic school is permitted to act like a Catholic school when the doctrine becomes socially offensive.
In New York, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne — who provide free end-of-life care to cancer patients who cannot pay — are being pressed under state law to assign rooms by gender identity rather than sex, open bathrooms across sex, and require staff to use residents’ chosen pronouns. The penalties are not theoretical. They can include fines, loss of licensing, and even jail. The same law exempts Christian Science facilities. It does not exempt the Sisters.
A Catholic institution’s refusal to use gender-affirming pronouns...is treated as though it were racial exclusion
In Colorado, the state funds preschools of many kinds, but not the Archdiocese of Denver’s, because the Archdiocese will not remove Catholic teaching on sex and gender from how it admits and forms children. That case is now headed toward the Supreme Court.
A Catholic institution’s refusal to use gender-affirming pronouns or provide gender-identity accommodations is treated as though it were racial exclusion. Its refusal to assent to something false and contradictory to the Catholic faith is treated as unlawful discrimination, a grave moral failure, and an assault on human dignity.
But the comparison doesn’t hold. This is not a failure in charity or a failure to recognize the intrinsic dignity of other people. It’s a refusal to lie to them, out of recognition of their intrinsic dignity.
The leap from “gender-ism” to “racism” is one so vast, across a logical chasm so deep, that a rational person would rightly think it impossible. And truly, it is impossible, except for a bridge in the middle that makes the jump easier and the distance harder to discern: the gay rights movement. This frame was built in stages over time.
The Framework
First came racial equality, a real injustice that was rightly confronted by the culture and the Church. No problem there. Racism is evil. Racial segregation was unjust. Laws treating people as inferior because of race deserved to be torn down.
Then came the movement to treat sexual orientation as the next civil-rights cause, morally equivalent to race. That is where the first major shift happens. People who experience same-sex attraction have the dignity and basic civil rights that belong to every human person. But the legal question over same-sex marriage was not merely whether people should be treated with dignity. It was whether the law should treat same-sex relationships as equivalent to the union of husband and wife, especially where children, family, and the common good are concerned.
The courts treated that distinction as though it barely mattered.
The argument drew on Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down race-based marriage bans. But Loving dealt with a racial barrier imposed on a man and a woman entering marriage. Their race did not change the nature of their union. They were still a man and a woman in a marital relationship.
Same-sex marriage is a different kind of claim. It does not remove a racial obstacle from marriage. It requires the law to treat two men or two women as though their relationship is the same kind of union as husband and wife. That is not the same issue with a new victim group. It is a different issue altogether.
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That is where the courts’ fatal flaw in logic rests: taking precedent related to interracial marriage and applying it to relationships of a different nature and kind. The secular culture was already treating the gay-rights issue as a civil-rights issue equal to the race-equality movement of the past. The Supreme Court did more than codify the conclusion. It helped codify the faulty thought process behind it.
Now comes the gender issue: the next phase in the construction of a Reality Distortion Field.
The same pattern repeats. If sexual orientation is like race, and gender identity is like sexual orientation, then gender identity becomes like race. The conclusion is not argued from the beginning. It is inherited from the earlier comparison.
From there, the conclusion is already loaded. Refusing a pronoun mandate can be made to sound as morally outrageous as refusing to integrate a lunch counter. Refusing to assign rooms by gender identity can be made to sound like denying someone equal access to education. Refusing to teach children that sex is fluid can be made to sound like excluding a class of people from public life.
But those things are not the same.
Race is not a claim about reality that another person must affirm. A person’s race does not require a Catholic school, hospice, or preschool to deny its doctrine, alter its language, reorder intimate spaces, or teach children that the sexed body is irrelevant. Racial equality asks that a person not be excluded because of what he is. Gender ideology, as these mandates apply it, asks Catholic institutions to speak and act against what they believe is true.
That is a different kind of demand. It is not asking for access. It is asking for affirmation.
That is the thread running through these cases. The Dominican Sisters are not refusing to care for the dying. The Colorado preschools are not trying to run a public ideological project with Catholic decoration. The Melbourne school is not accused of throwing a teacher into the street. The conflict is not over whether Catholic institutions will recognize the dignity of the human person. It is over whether they can be forced to deny what they believe is true about the human person.
That is why the comparison to racism has to be rejected. Racism excluded people from equal treatment because of who they were. Gender ideology demands that Catholic institutions surrender the truth about what the human person is. One is injustice. The other is coercion disguised as justice.
The Church is not being asked to be fair. It is being asked to lie.
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T.J. Haines
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