Judge blasts ‘woke’ colleagues in case of Christian women’s spa forced to allow naked men

March 16, 2026

Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke penned a sharp dissent last week, accusing his fellow judges of forcing a Christian-owned women’s nude spa in Washington state to admit naked men.

The Christian Post reports that the case against Olympus Spa, a traditional Korean women-only nude spa in Seattle, came after Washington state moved against the spa’s policy barring men from its facilities.

The case dates back to February 2020, when a local trans activist filed a complaint with the state commission after Olympus Spa denied a membership application.

The spa’s owners, Myoon Woon Lee and Sun Lee, say their Christian beliefs forbid unmarried men and women from seeing each other naked.

That commission later served the spa with a discrimination complaint and moved to enforce the state law.

However in a 2022 federal lawsuit, the spa said the state had violated its free speech and religious rights and had compelled speech by requiring the business to remove references to biological women from its website and require staff to undergo inclusivity training. 

According to the Christian Post, U.S. District Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein ruled against the spa in June 2023 and a divided Ninth Circuit panel later upheld that ruling.

Judge VanDyke accused his colleagues of sacrificing constitutional protections and women’s privacy in the case when the Ninth Circuit declined to rehear a divided three-judge panel’s ruling against Olympus Spa.

In his dissent, VanDyke observed that women and girls at the spa, including some as young as 13, could be exposed to male genitalia under the ruling and wrote that the spa’s owners did not want “swinging dicks” in their business.

More than two dozen judges rebuked VanDyke for his blunt language but VanDyke accused his colleagues of “selective outrage” and pointed to the “woke judges’ willingness” to sacrifice constitutional rights on the altar of “social progress.”

Photo: top, Credit: YouTube/U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit