(LifeSiteNews) — Circuit Judge Lawrence Van Dyke attracted the ire of nearly 30 of his colleagues after writing a furious and crude dissent in response to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision not to review the claims of Olympus Spa. The Christian business in Washington state claims that their constitutional rights have been violated by a law requiring them to permit trans-identifying men into their facility.
In 2020, trans-identifying man Haven Wilvich filed a complaint against the spa for denying him service with the Washington Human Rights Commission. Olympus Spa, which is owned by conservative Christians, settled in 2021 with the WHRC by promising to change its policies forbidding trans-identifying men from using their facility, but also stated that the settlement was forced and violated their freedom of association, freedom of speech, and exercise of religion under the First Amendment.
The following year, Olympus brought a constitutional challenge, which was dismissed in 2023 by a federal judge who claimed that because the state’s “anti-discrimination” law applies to all businesses, the law does not specifically violate the rights of the owners of Olympus. In May, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the ruling 2-1. Last week, the full court voted not to review that decision. Enter Judge Lawrence Van Dyke, who decided to make the rare move of using blunt, crude language to illustrate his contempt for the decision.
“This is a case about swinging d**cks,” Van Dyke wrote. “The Christian owners of Olympus Spa — a traditional, women-only, nude spa — understandably don’t want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don’t want them in their spa either.”
But Washington state insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit. You may think that swinging d**ks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong. But as much as you might be understandably shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa — some as young as 13 — to be visually assaulted by the real thing. Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds. Woke regulators and complicit judges seem entirely willing, even eager, to ignore the consequences that their Frankenstein social experiments impose on real women and young girls.
As intended, this dissent infuriated Van Dyke’s colleagues. Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote that Van Dyke’s “crass” words served, as Reuters put it, “only to distract from what she said was a routine case involving discrimination in public accommodations.” Six other judges affirmed her statement.
Of course, McKeown’s response to Van Dyke affirms his primary point: That judges are now routinely discriminating against women and girls by upholding the fictitious right of trans-identifying men to enter into their facilities and strip down regardless of whether they want to be exposed to male genitalia or not, and that Christians who have built their businesses to serve only women or girls have no right to keep such men out of their facilities. McKeown rightly called Van Dyke’s words “crass.” Van Dyke rightly noted that he was merely calling a spade a spade, so to speak.
The judges who rushed to condemn Van Dyke’s dissent likely played directly into his strategy of drawing public attention to the case and exposing the moral insanity of his colleagues, for whom such rulings are merely “routine.” These judges are more offended by Van Dyke’s language than by the fact that their ruling will allow men into private female spaces. Van Dyke’s deliberate choice of crude language, one suspects, was a ploy to highlight the fact that his colleagues find a crass description of the behavior they endorse more horrifying than the behavior itself.
Two other Circuit Court judges, John Owens and Danielle Forrest, also wrote a one-line response to Van Dyke’s dissent: “Regarding the dissenting opinion of Judge Van Dyke: We are better than this.” They’re not quite correct. We used to be. We no longer are, and that is the point Judge Van Dyke was inelegantly trying to make.
