What Happened Today: June 29, 2023
Affirmative action struck down; Bibi steps back on judicial reform; UBI gets a trial run
The Big Story
In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court on Thursday banned the practice of affirmative action in college admission. The court ruled that by taking race into account, the admissions criteria used by Harvard University and University of North Carolina—private and public institutions, respectively—violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and must be changed. The decision essentially overrules a 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger in which Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, stated, “Student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify the use of race in university admissions.”
Chief Justice John Roberts elucidated his rationale for the majority decision, writing, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” nodding to the evidence brought before the court that Asian American students, for example, were discriminated against in college admissions. The dissenting liberal justices, led by Sonia Sotomayor, replied that the decision is “further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”
George Mason Law Professor Eugene Kontorovich gave The Scroll his take on the legality and impact of the decision:
Affirmative action in school admissions has long been a constitutional anomaly—the one situation where treating people differently based on racial and national classifications has been deemed acceptable under the Equal Protection Clause. The dizzying, ever-changing array of benefited categories has long ago detached these policies from any justification in remedying specific discriminatory policies. The Court’s decision restores coherence to the law, but it is likely that universities will respond simply by trying to camouflage their racialist policies.
Read More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-rules-against-affirmative-action-c94b5a9c
And check out Tablet’s own investigation into Ivy League admissions and their impact on Jewish students, here: https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/gatecrashers/episode-8-harvard-university-jewish-student-population-ivy-league
In the Back Pages: How to Get Excommunicated in 2023
The Rest
→ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he’d be striking the part of his judicial overhaul plan that would give the Knesset full veto power over court decisions. “It’s out,” he said in a wide-ranging interview with The Wall Street Journal, adding that he’d also cut back the planned proposal to give the ruling coalition more power over judicial appointments. These concessions come months after the original plan sent hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets for some of the largest protests in years. “I’m attentive to the public pulse and to what I think will pass muster,” said Netanyahu. He also commented on the Ukrainian ambassador’s accusation that the Jewish state wasn’t doing enough to help the war effort: “We have concerns that I don’t think any of the Western allies of Ukraine have,” referring to the Israeli need for Russian cooperation in order to carry out air strikes against the Iranian-backed forces in Syria.
You can watch the interview, here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/netanyahu-revives-judicial-overhaul-stripped-of-most-controversial-piece-33160de
→ A recent study by the Cambridge University Press shows that between 2012 and 2021 an astonishing 60,000 Dutch citizens elected to die by euthanasia, which the Netherlands first approved in 2002. The real bombshell is that of the 900 available case files, eight people said their only cause to meet the threshold of “unbearable” suffering was their autism, including five people under the age of 30. If the 900 cases are representative, that means potentially more than 500 Dutch citizens have died by euthanasia because of their autism, and the government has allowed it. “There’s no doubt in my mind these people were suffering. … But is society really OK with sending this message, that there’s no other way to help them, and it’s just better to be dead?” says one of the researchers, Irene Tuffrey-Wijne, a palliative care specialist at Britain’s Kingston University. According to the study, “In one-third of cases, physicians noted explicitly that ASD and intellectual disability are not treatable and that this was the key consideration in their assessment that there was no prospect of improvement in the patient’s suffering.”
→ Saudi national oil company Saudi Aramco has signed an $11 billion deal with energy company TotalEnergies to build a new processing factory near a disputed oil field in the Arabian Gulf.
The field sits off the coast of Kuwait in disputed waters, part of which are claimed by the Iranian government.
While Iran began a project in 2001 to mine the field for natural gas, Kuwait threatened to take the country to court, and it stopped.
The move comes in the midst of a recent rapprochement between regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, but Iranian officials are sending mixed signals that make it unclear whether the drilling is a sign of new cooperation or renewed tensions.
Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Association of Iranian Oil and Gas Drilling Companies Hedayatollah Khademi, responded to the new announcement harshly, saying, “It seems that we have surrendered the joint fields to the neighbours.” However, in a statement earlier this week, National Iranian Oil Company head Mohsen Khojasteh-Mehr said the two nations were planning joint drilling in other non-contested fields.
→ Myriam Ackermann-Sommer is France’s first female Orthodox rabbi. Modern Orthodox, that is. Ordained this month by Yeshivat Maharat, a revolutionary training program for women, Ackermann-Sommer, along with her husband, also a rabbi, runs Paris-based Ayeka, the only Orthodox synagogue in France with female clergy. While still respecting Jewish law—e.g., 10 men are required for a minyan—Myriam leads worshippers in prayer and has initiated study groups for women. “Jewish girls in France grow up surrounded by women who excel in all areas of civilian life. They are lawyers, doctors, teachers … but all of our rabbis are long-bearded men! We need women to be involved in Jewish life as well,” said the female pioneer. Rabbi Yves Marciano of the Orthodox Les Tournelles Synagogue in Paris disagreed. “In Jewish tradition, the notion of modernity does not mean anything at all, the strength of Judaism is that there has been no change since Mount Sinai,” he told Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
→ A new ProPublica investigation into health insurance companies came up empty. And that was the point. While the legislation for Obamacare forced insurers to publicly share more information about their business operations, lax government oversight has kept information about data on denied insurance claims from seeing the light of day. A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of HealthCare.gov data suggests that companies are denying 1 in 5 claims on average. Its senior fellow Karen Pollitz pointed out to ProPublica that the stakes are high: “This is life and death for people: If your insurance won’t cover the care you need, you could die.” According to Mila Kofman, who leads the District of Columbia’s Affordable Care Act exchange, the insurers don’t want this information made public because, for example, they don’t want the sickest people flocking to the plans with the lowest refusal rates. Not one state would share the insurance data with ProPublica.
Read More: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-often-do-health-insurers-deny-patients-claims
→ With pending funding from the government, U.K. think tank Autonomy could lead the country’s first experiment with universal basic income. The trial would pay 30 people $1,983 per month over two years to gather data on how the money affects those people’s lives. Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy, says, “Basic income is going to be a crucial part of securing livelihoods in the future,” due to increasing automation and climate change. While it’s unclear how climate change would affect people’s ability to work, the risks of making human beings obsolete in an increasingly computer-run world are well known.
→ On Tuesday, French police shot and killed 17-year-old Nahel M. at a traffic stop in Nanterre as he attempted to flee the police who were following him at the time for his erratic driving. In a moment reminiscent of the 2020 protests across the United States in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Nahel’s North African identity has become a flash point and plunged France into mass protests with burning cars and barricaded streets across the country. The law enforcement officer in question is being held in police custody on charges of voluntary homicide. Frustrated, perhaps, at the speed of the investigation, one of Nahel’s neighbors told Reuters, “We demand that the judiciary does its job, otherwise we’ll do it our way.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
‘I Speak English, but I Don’t Speak American’ by Abigail Pogrebin
A roundtable discussion with Israeli expats living in the U.S. about why they came to America, how they feel about leaving Israel, the differences in Jewish life between the two countries, and what Americans get wrong about Israelis
The Jews of Deadwood by Tablet Podcasts
Digging up South Dakota’s surprising Jewish history on our trip ‘Across the JEW.S.A.’
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
How to Get Excommunicated in 2023
Is Ryan Turnipspeed an ‘alt right Christian extremist’ or has the Lutheran church gone woke?
Earlier this year, Ryan Turnipseed, a college student and devout Lutheran in Oklahoma with a modest following on Twitter, found himself on the brink of ex-communication by his church.
In response to his stern criticisms of the church, Turnipspeed was first denounced as a fascist by an outside party, then lumped in with a call to excommunicate fascists led by his church, and finally summoned for a meeting with church leaders where they informed him and his father that he was associating with evil. The scene was simultaneously old-fashioned, with its back-and-forth accusations of heresy and bitter struggles over the soul, and ‘very online,’ very 2023.
The specter of Christian nationalism and other supposedly extremist right-wing ideologies festering inside middle American churches has become a focal point within the political culture as well as the national security establishment. In February, in the same period when Turnipseed was clashing with his church, a leaked document from the FBI showed that the agency’s Richmond, Virginia office was using funds earmarked for domestic violent extremism to monitor "radical traditionalist Catholics.” The FBI retracted the memo after it was exposed by a whistleblower, but not before it revealed that the agency’s criteria for designating people as extremists was that they preferred to worship at the traditional Latin mass. To critics, it seemed to show the federal government taking steps to criminalize religious traditionalism.
Yet rather than simply being an attack by the government on Christians, the case mirrored a conflict that is playing out within churches as well. Last February, in an interview with the progressive Center for American Progress, Amanda Tyler, a lawyer and the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, declared: “the single biggest threat to religious freedom in the United States today is Christian nationalism.”
On January 21st, Ryan Turnipseed stepped into this larger debate and made his stand—as one does in the age of online religious wars—by authoring a Twitter thread about the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s (LCMS) new edition of Luther’s Large Catechism.
Luther’s Large Catechism is the Lutheran doctrine outside of the Bible. Originally authored by Martin Luther, each section is broken down into explanations designed to help clergymen teach the Lutheran faith. It is foundational to Lutheranism—as vital to the faith as the Catechism of the Catholic Church is to Catholicism. Turnipseed’s thread went softly viral, receiving just under 1,000 likes on a platform where the most viral tweets regularly reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of engagements.
Turnipseed’s central claims were that the LCMS’s new edition had gone so far in accommodating the dogmas of American political progressivism that the book undermined the faith entirely. In his thread, some of his complaints about the updated text were that it equivocated “homosexuality, pornography, sodomy, pedophilia, whorishness, and transgenderism with heterosexual fornication outside of sex”; “affirm[ed] the reality of transgenderism”; and contradicted scripture by “saying that Genesis is entirely separate from any ‘scientific’ theories.”
While there are a few places in Turnipseed’s thread where his judgments seem motivated by his own ideological concerns, his tone remains levelheaded. He’s stern, certainly, but there is no extremist language, no incitement to violence, and no name-calling. One gets the impression that he’s simply a conservative churchgoer who disagrees with changes being made and is deeply concerned. It’s the type of disagreement that is–or should be–par for the course whenever major changes are being made to a foundational religious document.
According to Turnipseed–and to LCMS President Matthew Harrison–he wasn’t the only person who raised objections about these changes. In a short piece published in a small publication called Christianity Today, other critics, like pastor and blogger Larry Beane and pastor David Ramirez, were also concerned that “some of the essays, which are not Lutheran doctrine, mishandled current issues like racial justice, human sexuality, and gun rights.”
On January 23rd, two weeks after the updated Large Catechism’s release, President Harrison announced on Twitter that LCMS would pause publication and distribution of the new catechism so he could evaluate the criticism they had received about the changes. Nine days later, the LCMS concluded that the changes would stay, and they would continue to distribute the updated version.
But here's where the story takes a turn and enters the stage of national political drama. Harrison didn’t frame the controversy as a disagreement within the faith. Instead, Harrison presented it as something far more sinister. In a letter to the LCMS, he singled out the alt-right—an umbrella label used to describe various strands of neo-fascist and white nationalist ideology— for fomenting criticism against the new catechism and called for their ex-communication.
In his letter, he wrote:
These “alt-right” individuals were at the genesis of a recent controversy surrounding essays accompanying a new publication of Luther’s Large Catechism. This group used that opportunity to produce not only scandalous attacks and widespread falsehoods but also to promote their own absolutist ideologies.
He called for a complete rejection of the alt-right, characterizing their views as “white supremacy, Nazism, pro-slavery, anti-interracial marriage, women as property, fascism, death for homosexuals, even genocide.”
Blaming the “alt-right” for the pushback against the church’s new directive didn’t sit well with Turnipseed. “Alt-right” is a very specific label, and a dated one at that. It’s not that no such movement has existed, but it's often applied in a way that is deliberately vague and overly broad. In reality, "alt-right" describes a particular group of people that rose to national prominence during a particular moment in time that peaked in or around 2017. At worst, the label is a lazy smear against right-wingers. To evoke “alt-right,” in many situations, is to immediately shut down difficult conversations by associating conservatism with racially-motivated violence.
Turnipseed discovered a week later that it wasn’t just that Harrison was condemning the "alt-right," he was also condemning him personally. Shortly after Harrison’s letter was published, Turnipseed’s father received an email from a pastor stating that the church was concerned for his son’s physical and spiritual safety.
It tunred out that a lengthy blog post authored by an anonymous group of Antifa activists had been sent to the church. The post called Turnipseed and others “Lutefash” (Lutheran fascist) and alleged that he was part of a group that wanted to raise a “mighty fortress of neo-nazi hatred” within the faith. While not everything in the post is factually incorrect—and some of what the post describes is indeed troubling—it’s not a fair-minded fact-finding document but a deeply editorialized attack written from an explicitly ideological perspective that is, itself, inconsistent with church teachings. The post uses explosive, theatrical language and lumps together a broad group of people. Perhaps most crucially, the post equated Turnipspeed with Corey J. Mahler, a controversial figure who had been previously barred from attending services.
At the very least, this was the kind of document you’d want to fact-check before acting on. The pastor, however, read or heard about this blog post and concluded that Turnipseed was associating with the wrong kinds of people online.
The worry wasn’t totally unfounded.
Corey J. Mahler, according to his Telegram, wants a return to monarchism by way of authoritarianism that he sometimes will describe as "facist" or "National Socialist. He is a self-described Christian Nationalist, and has a number of views that many Christians–even conservative Christians–would find offensive, such as the view that slavery is supported by scripture. He is also a World War 2 revisionist (and possibly a Holocaust denier), and is an antisemite. In one post on his Telegram, he says, “Whatever you people may believe Hitler did to the Jews in the 1940s, what God is going to do to them in eternity is going to be much, much worse.” In another, he says, “Telling the truth about Jews enrages them.”
While Turnipseed’s own online presence doesn’t promote the same views as Mahler, he did seem okay with engaging with Mahler’s content. For example, Turnipseed hosted Mahler on his podcast a week before his thread criticizing the new catechism. But to Turnipseed, the whole thing felt like guilt by association.
Turnipseed defended his criticisms of the new catechism and summarized his problems with the condemnation of the alt-right in a blog post on the website Gab, a Twitter alternative that spun up during the 2016 elections after a particularly aggressive wave of suspensions that targeted users on the right and far right. In a post titled “Here I Stand,” Turnipseed laid out his views. Much of what Turnipseed describes in “Here I Stand” is unsurprising for a conservative Christian, and much of it would be sympathetic to moderate or progressive Christians as well.
But his coolly logical approach also reveals his commitment to a close reading of the Bible and of Lutheranism that places the historical foundations of the faith above the evolving moral concerns of the present. Turnipseed writes:
Both Martin Luther and the first president of the LCMS, C.F.W. Walther, condemned abolitionism and wrote extensive defenses of slavery and, by extension, white supremacy. Both Walther and Luther must now be condemned as “alt-right”, and both would be excommunicated from President Harrison’s new LCMS.
When reached for comment to clarify whether he was defending slavery or white supremacy, or merely pointing out that condemning anyone on the ‘alt-right,’ by Harrison’s definition, would erode the foundations of the faith, Turnipseed responded: “It was indeed to show the wild inconsistency with the modern LCMS and its forefathers.” He continued, “Condemning Martin Luther as a Lutheran isn’t necessarily a conflict of interest, but rather it’s not Lutheranism recognizable to any of our forbearers.”
It is possible to read Turnipseed’s concerns in at least two ways: In one interpretation, he is pointing out that Lutheranism is simply not compatible with contemporary mores. “A moderate from the Civil Rights Era,” writes Turnipspeed, “would be excommunicated today under the supposedly conservative Matthew Harrison’s LCMS.”
The essential question is, ‘at what point does updating a faith tradition’s views to better fit with the political climate alter the religion beyond recognizability?’ But in the alternate reading, Turnipseed is not just asking questions, he is posing his own version of Lutheranism that is not only incompatible with the one coming from the church’s leaders but would, for instance, maintain Lutheranism's traditional approach to condemning interracial marriage. If no evolution of the faith is possible or permissible, as Turnipseed seems to suggest at certain points, then what excuse could any good Lutheran have for no longer defending slavery?
When asked for comment, Turnipseed explained his position: “The 'excuse' would be to oppose slavery for secular reasons and not religious ones. ‘I’m against slavery because it is evil’ encounters the contradictions I point out in my article.”
After Turnipseed’s post was published, the supervising pastor (in LCMS called a Circuit Pastor) of his congregation reached out to him. LCMS wanted to have a meeting with Turnipseed, where according to the Circuit Pastor, he was going to be issued a warning for his “online activity.” Turnipseed wasn’t provided with an agenda, as is customary for this type of meeting—just a warning that his congregation was concerned without specifics.
When Turnipseed pressed the Circuit Pastor, he was later told that he would also be asked to renounce his connection to Mahler and other so-called “alt-right” Internet personalities, though the Circuit Pastor couldn’t define “alt-right.”
During the conversation, Turnipseed asked him a question: Would churchgoers who voted in policies like abortion be placed under the same scrutiny he was, for hanging out with people considered persona non grata? The Circuit Pastor told him no, but that this was about him, not Democrats.
The meeting day came. Turnipseed was nervous. He was aware of two other incidents where churchgoers had been penalized without having undergone the proper processes, one of which was the decision to bar Mahler from being on church property. Turnipseed decided to record the session (Oklahoma is a one-party consent state).
At the meeting was the Circuit Pastor, Turnipseed’s congregation pastor, and two elders who Turnipseed claimed he was not informed would be present. The 90-minute session was a complicated, emotional back and forth. The clergymen were concerned about Turnipseed’s online activity, as they’d said, and his association with Mahler. Turnipseed was told by his pastor, “From where I sit, these men [Mahler and his podcast co-host, Woe] are proliferating evil [...], from a casual glance, you are closely tied to their work.” The clergy believed that he was promoting hateful views by associating with Mahler in any capacity.
To Turnipseed and to anyone acquainted with the online spheres he is operating in, “closely tied to their work” is an exaggeration, though it’s true that he and Mahler do exist in the same dissident ecosystem. But Turnipseed and Mahler are in dialogue in the same way some conservative journalists–particularly ones who don’t write for legacy publications–are “in dialogue” with the right-wing Twitter personality, Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), whose social and political commentary is at times–to put it lightly–“out there.” There’s a continuum of thought that exists outside of traditional institutions, and some people are more extreme than others, but the Internet places them all in the same broad geography. Plenty of right-wing journalists have engaged with less fringe aspects of BAP’s work and worldview, but that doesn’t mean that they endorse him wholesale, and, indeed, many have engaged with him in a deliberate effort to dissuade younger right-wingers from taking up his project. The nature of online discourse creates an atmosphere where moderate Republicans sometimes quote-tweet self-styled National Socialists. They might sometimes even agree with one another on a topic-to-topic basis. It’s something that’s unheard of in the mainstream media space where you’re asked to shun people who may have said something offensive on social media ten years ago–forget ten posts ago.
It’s also an atmosphere that’s anathema to the mainstream gatekeeper mindset and difficult to fully convey–and fully understand–if you’re unfamiliar with its framework. It would be disingenuous to say that Turnipseed doesn’t believe things that are beyond the realm of mainstream acceptability. He doesn’t just dance on the razor’s edge of what’s socially sanctioned, he crosses it. But it would also be disingenuous to say he’s promoting the same ideas as Mahler. For example, Turnipseed does not share Mahler’s views on National Socialism.
From the clergy’s perspective though, it felt as though Turnipseed and Mahler were the same, and that a retweet meant a full-bodied endorsement of his platform. The clergy wasn’t just unaware of the labyrinthine social structure and culture of Twitter and online political discourse; Turnipseed believes they were also informed primarily by the original blog post published by Antifa. In the recording offered by Turnipseed, one clergymember admitted that “at least 75%” of the research about Turnipseed’s online presence was brought to them by third parties.
As Turnipseed saw it, he was having challenging, interesting conversations with controversial people, functioning, as his father put it, “essentially as a journalist,” and every nuance was important. Yes, Mahler and others espoused unconventional and even hateful views, but Turnipseed disagreed with those. He wasn’t going to “disavow the wholeness of their messaging” because they had “bad politics.” That was something Leftists did.
The clergy, on the other hand, felt that Turnipseed didn’t understand “the gravity of their evil.”
From an outsider’s perspective, it may feel like Turnipseed was being too pedantic. To quote one of the clergy members Turnipseed recorded, “if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it doesn’t matter if it’s not a duck–people are going to say it’s a duck.” It should be “easy” to disavow someone like Mahler.
But the disagreement isn't necessarily over Mahler’s views as much as the demand for disavowal. The issue of abortion is salient here. According to Lutheran teaching, a congregant who is pro-choice is literally endorsing a mother murdering her child. That, according to Lutheran teachings, would be as evil as some of the more heinous things Mahler has said.
Yet as the same clergy member acknowledged, they won’t disavow Democrats. They won’t condemn people who “enshrine pro-abortion policies into law.” If you’re outside of the faith–if you’re a progressive–the comparison between support for (or even entertaining a discussion of) legal abortion and white nationalism must seem, if it is conceivable at all, absurd and offensive. But within it–if you put yourself into the headspace of a Christian who believes that life literally starts at conception–the situation is more complicated. Why should one set of “bad politics” be more worthy of condemnation than another set of “bad politics?”
Turnipseed’s conclusion–that it’s a matter of fashionability–makes sense from where he’s standing. Either the LCMS is playing a game of respectability politics or they are more progressive than they themselves realize.
Whatever the case, the scales tip towards the current order, and the church is not run as a democracy. For the moment at least, it is not Turnipseed but his accusers within the church–leaders who have aligned themselves with a broader Progressive effort to root out the scourge of Christian extremism–who get to define what Lutheranism is and who its enemies should be.
Katherine Dee is an internet culture reporter and advice columnist. You can find her at defaultfriend.substack.com.
Just thinking about something “different” these days is now become an offense. I see high school aged children who now will be fearful of “wrong-think”, thus destroying that most vital gift of the inquiring mind that can lead to greatness. We are killing ourselves off by a thousand cuts in a thousand ways.