CONFORM ! – WE HAVE WAYS TO MAKE YOU
It is appalling that these institutions are letting themselves be intimidated by the Human Rights Campaign which is peddling the political agenda of the LGBTQ community. NancyTHE WEEKLY STANDARDWe Have Ways to Make You Conform
The Human Rights Campaign’s sham rankings.The grievance-industry racket is as old as the culture war itself. But rarely has it been practiced as transparently as it was this past week by the Human Rights Campaign.
You may recall the Human Rights Campaign from its two-decade drive to legalize same-sex marriage, which HRC cleverly packaged as an apolitical, universal “human right.” Having won their victory through the majesty of Anthony Kennedy’s pen, however, the folks at HRC decided not to press on for same-sex marriage in, say, Saudi Arabia and China, but rather to throw themselves fully into shakedown mode here at home, where they make busy with corporate outreach (companies pay them to achieve bronze, silver, gold, or platinum “partnerships”) and fundraising (you can get a specialty HRC Visa card to automate donations) and bullying the occasional doctor or scientist who will not parrot the current orthodoxy on human sexuality.
Last fall, for instance, Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh published a report on sexuality and gender in the New Atlantis, a journal on technology and society. Mayer is an epidemiologist trained in psychiatry who is a resident scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Paul McHugh is a professor of psychiatry at Hopkins. Their report, a review of the scientific literature on the nature of sexual orientation, sexuality, and gender identity, was a detailed yet accessible document written for a general audience. (We covered it in these pages at the time, “Studying the Unstudiable,” September 12, 2016.)
Right from the start, the Human Rights Campaign was unhappy with the report. The HRC began warning Johns Hopkins that it would take action against the institution if it did not take significant steps to distance the medical school from McHugh and Mayer’s report. The big threat: If Hopkins didn’t punish Mayer and McHugh, the school’s intransigence would hurt its rankings in HRC’s next Healthcare Equality Index (HEI).
In 2007, the HRC began compiling an annual index of LGBTQ equality and patient care for health care institutions. Inclusion in the index was purely voluntary. The HRC invited clinics and hospitals to submit themselves for review. Participation, they unsubtly advised, would “Reduce risk of litigation, complaints, and negative publicity.”
Despite any resemblances to a protection scheme, the HEI was presented as a super-duper scientific exercise. There were detailed criteria in five categories: patient nondiscrimination, visitation, decision-making, cultural competency training for staff, and employment policies. In the first year of the report, 30 institutions (representing 78 hospitals) elected to participate. In return, the Human Rights Campaign kept all of the results confidential.
The next year, the HRC used the same criteria, but made the results public. Happily enough, all of the hospitals who submitted to the examination were given a participation trophy. The HRC offered no rankings or demerits—just a long list of checked boxes and kind words.
Johns Hopkins participated that year and did just fine. In the 2009 survey, more hospitals volunteered to participate and, having reached a critical mass, the HRC shifted gears again and established a hierarchy, with a list of 10 top performer hospitals that represented the gold standard for LGBTQ equality.
With each passing year more hospitals threw themselves on the mercy of the Human Rights Campaign. It’s hard to understand why. Maybe hospital administrators were getting woke. Maybe they were subject to pressure from their peers. Maybe they understood that as more institutions placed themselves under the protective umbrella of the Human Rights Campaign, the more the stragglers would stand out.
Whatever the case, the 2010 report represented the first change in methodology for the index, with the HRC doing away with the “decision-making” category and including a heavy emphasis on gender identity. Lots and lots of the participating institutions failed this new trans test, but they all failed together, and HRC used the carrot and not the stick. Whatever else you want to say about the Human Rights Campaign, they understand bureaucracies the way Tolstoy understood people. The following year the list of “top performers” more than doubled, as institutions tried to get right by the new transgender agenda.
As the number of participating hospitals swelled, so did the ranks of the “top performer” list. In 2012, Johns Hopkins, along with 70 other respondents, got a gold star from the HRC and became an “Equality Leader.” Hopkins retained this status through 2016, though by that point it had become somewhat devalued. Of the 568 institutions participating last year, the HRC designated 496 of them “Equality Leaders.”
All of which left the Human Rights Campaign with a problem when it came to the Mayer-McHugh report. The group had threatened to punish Hopkins if the medical school didn’t take action against Mayer and McHugh. But Hopkins was already an Equality Leader, and the institution hadn’t changed any of its policies in the areas that the HRC measured. Punishing Hopkins would reveal that the essence of the Healthcare Equality Index was mau-mauing, not Science.
So this year the HRC decided to radically revamp its methodology. The new index awards 40 points for patient nondiscrimination and staff training; 30 points for patient services and support; 20 points for employee benefits and policies; and 10 points for patient and community engagement. Giving hospitals a possible total of 100 points.
Oh, and there was one other tweak: The HRC introduced a new category called “Responsible Citizenship.” Institutions could not earn any points for being responsible citizens. But they could be docked 25 points if the Human Rights Campaign decided that they had not been responsible citizens.
Of the 590 institutions in the 2017 index, you’ll never guess which was the only one to be deemed an “irresponsible citizen.” I’ll give you a hint: It rhymes with Bonds Bopkins.
To be sure the people at Hopkins got the message, the HRC even included this helpful explanatory paragraph:
The point deduction may be reflected in a current or future score, depending on the situation. If applied to a current score, HEI Leader in LGBTQ Healthcare Equality status will be suspended or revoked as necessary. If at any time after losing points on this criterion, a healthcare facility changes course and satisfies the HRC Foundation’s noted concerns, HRC Foundation will re-evaluate the criterion for that facility.
It would be outrageous if it weren’t so pathetic.
For seven months now, gay activists—from HRC, to college sociology professors, to journalists—have attacked the Mayer-McHugh report without laying a glove on it. The reason the report has been substantively bulletproof is immediately clear to anyone who bothers to read it: It’s an extremely cautious document that relies entirely on published research and presents both sides of all arguments. If you had to boil Mayer and McHugh’s conclusions down to a single sentence, it would go something like this: Human sexuality and gender are incredibly complicated, a lot of what’s presented as “fact” has no sturdy basis in scientific research, and we really ought to study the entire subject more rigorously.
But even this careful, empirical view is regarded as a blasphemy against LGBTQ orthodoxy.
That orthodoxy has shifted over time, sometimes insisting sexual orientation is a lifestyle choice, sometimes a spot on a sliding scale, sometimes a hardwired genetic fact—whatever is most politically expedient at the time. The Mayer-McHugh report makes it plain that all of these claims have been scientifically hollow. The truth may be one of them, or some of them, or all of them—or something else altogether. We don’t know, and the people who have spent the last 20 years insisting that we do know have been peddling a political agenda, not science.
The reaction to the Mayer-McHugh report reveals that the HRC is not an honest broker. It is concerned not with morality, nor responsibility, nor science. The Human Rights Campaign is devoted to one thing, and one thing only: power.
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
