While attending Sunday services at a Virginia church, Annie Peguero began nursing her daughter and, in keeping with the church’s policy, was promptly asked to do so in a private room. She now plans to take the church to court. Walter Olson explains:

In 2015, following the lead of many other states, Virginia passed a “law that says women have a right to breastfeed anywhere they have a legal right to be,” as the Washington Post reports. The law provides . . . no quarter, it would seem, for owners’ ordinary rights to set terms and conditions when they invite visits from the general public. . . .

Should [the mother] press a claim in court, she might have to contend with Virginia’s version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). . . . But since not all states have a version of the RFRA—and particularly since . . . a large sector of polite opinion is taking Ms. Peguero’s side and appears to see nothing wrong with applying such laws to churches—it seems likely that this will not be the last such claim.

Personally, I’m fine with public breastfeeding no longer being classed as an automatically shocking thing. But why is government dictation of how a church may arrange its worship services no longer classed as an automatically shocking thing?

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.