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few months back, I began a piece by referring to the left as “ever more unmoored from reality and hoisted on the petard of its own internal contradictions.” In the piece itself, I focused on few small-bore items that might have escaped the attention of Mishpacha readers: 1) the confirmation hearings for Naomi Rao to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals; and 2) the harassment of a woman with an online knitting business who violated progressive speech codes by describing her lifelong desire to visit “exotic” India.

But I passed on the really obvious examples. That same week, a poll showed Democrats nearly evenly split between socialism (democratic, of course) and capitalism as the preferred economic system for the United States. Also that same week, the water taps were turned off in Venezuela, and the populace reduced to boiling and drinking sewer water. Last week, former Colorado governor and current presidential aspirant John Hickenlooper was booed lustily at a Democratic state party convention in California when he said, “If we want to defeat Donald Trump in 2020... socialism is not the answer.”

But for overall looniness, nothing can beat the push to allow males to compete in sports as women on the basis of their “identification” at the time. The ideological claim that gender is only a “social construct” — i.e., you can be whatever you want to be — is being treated as fact.

Really? In 1988, Florence Griffith-Joyner set a women’s world record in the 100-meter dash of 10.49 seconds, which still stands. Last year alone, over 2,000 males worldwide ran that fast.

The reasons that men’s performance standards are so much higher has little to do with just being bigger, and much to do with morphology, even controlling for weight and height. Among the athletic advantages of males, on average: broader shoulders, greater volume of circulating blood, greater resistance to dehydration, more hemoglobin, greater upper body strength, greater bone density, higher systolic blood pressure, larger hearts, higher ratio of muscle-to-fat, and larger sweat capacity.

What was once simple common sense, and which remains so today — that men and women should compete in sports separately — is no longer. For decades, feminists have successfully campaigned under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act for equal funding of women’s collegiate sports, despite the lower rates of women participating. Now, the progressive left, by elevating a new “identity” to the top of the grievance totem pole, threatens to undermine all the advances in women’s sports.

Good male athletes who want to be champions — like Rachel McKinnon, born male, who recently won a world women’s cycling title — can simply “identify” as women for as long as they wish to compete. And then they can return to identifying with their original biological category. In the meantime, they are free to gobble up college athletic scholarships for women and dominate in competitions against biological women who have no chance. Another progressive revolution that eats its own.

A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD for women athletes may not be the most important item on the agenda of most Torah Jews. But collective insanity and the power of progressive fads to sweep away all before them should be. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives just passed the so-called “Equality Act,” which would make “gender identity” a protected category. Not a single Democrat voted no. And the bill would almost certainly become law were the Democrats to take the Senate and hold the House in 2020.

Professor Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia Law School, universally recognized as one of United States’ leading scholars on the religion clauses of the Constitution, spoke with National Review’s John McCormack about the bill. Laycock is that rare bird who supports both single-gender marriage and the right of Jack Phillips, the baker in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, not to bake cakes celebrating such unions. The Equality Act, Laycock said, would “probably” open all women’s sports competition to male participation, but it would do much, much more than that.

The Equality Act, he opined, makes no effort to balance and reconcile nondiscrimination with religious claims. Rather it seeks to “crush” religious conscientious objectors. It explicitly negates any defenses under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and heavily regulates religious nonprofits, including religious schools.

True, the Equality Act cannot take away defenses based on the Constitution: the “ministerial exemption,” for instance, would still prevent schools being told whom they must hire to teach religious subjects. But not those hired to teach secular subjects.

Laycock terms the types of constitutionally based defenses that religious schools and organizations might interpose to be at present “undeveloped” and uncertain of success, and acknowledges the possibility that religious schools could be ordered to teach a curriculum at loggerheads with traditional religious morality, as the government seeks to do in England today.

At the very least, the Equality Act, notes Rabbi Yaakov Menken of the Coalition for Jewish Values, “sends the message that the traditional religious understanding of marriage and gender is ‘bigoted’ — even illegal if acted upon.”

Lieberman, Chareidim, and the Draft

For the past five years or so, the chareidi community has not been at the center of the political debate in Israel. It now appears that respite is over thanks to Avigdor Lieberman, whose upcoming campaign will center on his refusal to give in to the chareidim on the draft issue.

The declining fortunes of Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party made clear to him that there is no future for a Russian immigrant party. The longer the immigrants are in Israel, the less they identify as immigrants; their children see themselves as full Israelis. He also picked up on something I warned of years ago: The broad consensus on security issues — there is little daylight between Blue and White and Likud on security — opens the way for a realignment of Israeli politics in which the chareidi parties no longer hold the balance of power.

And that would certainly be the case if Prime Minister Netanyahu were to exit the scene. As long as he is fighting for his political life, he has to hold the chareidi parties close.

Lieberman took the risk that by dooming efforts to form a right-wing government, he would lose the support of his strongly right-wing immigrant base. But he decided that the risk was necessary. He knew from past experience that the Defense Ministry would not propel him any higher up the Israeli political ladder. And he chose to get out in front on what he perceives to be an issue around which political realignment might take place: the chareidi draft.

Let us pray that Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the UN, did not serve as a harbinger of things to come when he proclaimed in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Knesset, “Now the major issue is not the threat to Israelis’ lives but the threat to their way of life from the chareidim.”

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 765. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com