A city honoring its police officers and firefighters with the patron saints those men and women have invoked for generations is not establishing a religion.
Page A5From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 1 September 2026
Court lets Christian employers discriminate against trans employees, then blocks a town from honoring Christian heroes.
As it ran on the front
Hang on, I had this written down somewhere — here, found it. Two rulings, same season. One says a Christian employer can decline to employ someone for being transgender. The other says a town can't put up statues of Christian heroes because they're Christian. Two courts, two facts, and I keep circling the same word in my notebook: 'Christian.' It shows up in both rulings and it means something different each time.
In the first one, 'Christian' describes the employer, and the ruling protects the employer's right to act on that identity in a hiring decision. In the second, 'Christian' describes the statue, and the ruling says the government can't act on that identity by paying for the statue. So — help me out here, because I'm not a lawyer, I'm just a guy with a notebook — is the operating rule that religious identity gets protected when it's the employer exercising it, and restricted when it's the government funding it? Because if that's the rule, is it written down anywhere, or is it just where the two rulings happen to land this year?…
…(cont) I wrote a household version of this down for myself, because I think better with objects. Say you've got two drawers in the same kitchen. One drawer, the town says: nothing religious goes in there, town money, town drawer, has to stay neutral. Fine, I get that drawer. The other drawer belongs to a private business, and the town says: put whatever you want in there, including a policy that turns away an employee for who they are. Same house. Same season. Different rule for each drawer. Is there a document somewhere that explains why the government drawer has to stay empty and the employer's drawer gets to be as full as he wants?
Oh, and — one more thing, before you go. Both rulings claim to be protecting the same value. Which drawer does the value actually live in?
“They'll let a boss show a trans worker the door and call it faith, but tell a town it can't put up a statue because it's too Christian. That's not principle, that's just picking which Christian gets the government's protection and which one gets used as the excuse. Follow the money and the answer's always the employer, never the worker.”
“These are two separate courts applying two separate legal standards, employment law versus Establishment Clause doctrine, they're not in tension. They're just — okay, they're both about religious liberty and they came out opposite ways, but that's nuance, that's how federalism works, courts are allowed to be inconsistent-sounding while being technically consistent.”
The receipts
A settlement with the Christian Employers Alliance blocks the EEOC from ever investigating the group’s members for gender identity discrimination. The post Christian Employers Can Now Discriminate Against Trans People appeared first on The…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.