Who Should Public Swimming Pools Serve? – The Atlantic

This week, a public pool in Brooklyn became the diving-off point for a new clash over religious law and religious coercion in New York City. For decades, the Metropolitan Recreation Center in Williamsburg has offered gender-separated swimming hours in an accommodation to the heavily Hasidic Jewish community that it serves.

After an anonymous complaint was lodged about its summer schedule, which includes two primetime hours of women-only swimming on Sunday afternoons, the city rescinded and then reaffirmed the right of the pool to maintain its separate hours. Some, a little less anonymously this time, registered dismay over the decision.

“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,” a local-edition New York Times editorial began. Explaining that Jewish law forbids women to bathe in front of men, the paper, echoed by a not insignificant chorus on social media, inveighed against what it called “a theocratic view of government services.”

Criticism quickly worked its way back to the Times. Over at Tablet, Yair Rosenberg highlighted a similar case of accommodation for Muslim American swimmers in Minnesota in 2013, which had then ignited a spasm of panic about a “creeping Sharia law” from predictable quarters. Rosenberg placed the paper in the unenviable company of anti-Muslim siren Pamela Geller. Others pointed out that, earlier this year, a rapturous Times feature on a Toronto neighborhood’s efforts to integrate Muslim immigrants led with a scene of a Somali woman enjoying a swim in a public pool during a women-only session.

Of course, how The New York Times negotiates its international features and local editorials isn’t the question here. Navigating the constitutionality of religious accommodation and human rights in New York City is complicated business. Ambassador Norman Eisen, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former ethics czar under President Obama, saw no problem with the accommodation in general, but did push back against the pool’s proposed Sunday afternoon hours.