[Editor’s Note: The traditionally anti-Semitic, fiercely liberal New York Times baldly struck out again this week against Jews. In a Wednesday editorial, they raged against Orthodox Jewish women seeking privacy – for reasons of modesty – when they swim. The Times says modesty is not a liberal value. Not alert religiously, the anti-religious Times only lately noticed the policy.]
Four times a week this summer — Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9:15 to 11 a.m., and Sunday afternoons from 2:45 to 4:45 — a public swimming pool on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn will be temporarily unmoored from the laws of New York City and the Constitution, and commonly held principles of fairness and equal access.
The pool will instead answer to the religious convictions of one neighborhood group. At those hours, women (and girls, too, on Sundays) will have the pool to themselves. Men and boys will not be permitted. Orthodox Jewish beliefs demand modesty in dress, and a strict separation of the sexes, and those are the beliefs to which the taxpayer-owned-and-operated Metropolitan Recreation Center will yield.
Sex-segregated hours have been the rule at the pool since “sometime during the 90s,” according to a spokesman for the parks department. The policy was instituted at the request of Orthodox women, apparently without any serious community objections.
But a recent anonymous complaint led the city’s Commission on Human Rights to notify the parks department that the policy violated the law. Then a new pool schedule was issued, with the women’s hours removed. That alarmed female swimmers, who alerted politicians, including the local state assemblyman, Dov Hikind.
The change was swiftly undone. The department now says it is working with the commission to come up with a solution that is acceptable — and legal — but for now, the women’s hours will remain.
Which is unfortunate. The city’s human rights law is quite clear that public accommodations like a swimming pool cannot exclude people based on sex. It allows for exemptions “based on bona fide considerations of public policy,” but this case — with its strong odor of religious intrusion into a secular space — does not seem bona fide at all.
Indeed, what Mr. Hikind, in a statement, called a “victory for human rights” is in fact a capitulation to a theocratic view of government services. Mr. Hikind wrote: “The community can rest much easier this Shabbos knowing that men and women can continue to swim separately.” It’s pretty clear what “community” Mr. Hikind means, and it is not the diverse neighborhood he was elected to represent, nor one that includes everybody who lives there.
Defenders of segregated swimming say men will have plenty of other hours to use the pool, which is true. But the summer sun shines equally on the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox, and that plus the New York City humidity make everybody uncomfortable and hot under the collar.
There is no just way to tell a sweaty Brooklynite on a Sunday afternoon that he should be ejected onto Bedford Avenue because one religious group doesn’t want him in the pool. The best solution would be for the city to immediately end religious segregation in the pools, and limit the rules of separation only to practical considerations, like keeping lap swimmers away from splashing children. Let those who cannot abide public, secular rules at a public, secular pool find their own private place to swim when and with whom they see fit.
