When Dan Levy responded to Shane Gillis’s joke that women at the gym “just dress like whores now,” he identified the moral failure at the center of the controversy: “Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”
Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew who presents himself as a defender of traditional values, took the opposite approach. He defended Gillis’s joke, dismissed the backlash as a “liberal meltdown,” and examined images of women in workout clothes to argue that men’s responses to revealing attire were predictable.
The contrast is striking. Levy is gay; Shapiro is heterosexual. Yet Levy, who does not share women’s experience of being judged for their clothing in quite the same way, demonstrated a more immediate concern for their dignity than Shapiro did in this exchange. Levy recognized that women do not surrender their humanity when they dress in ways someone else considers immodest. Shapiro redirected attention toward the women’s clothing and whether their appearance justified the insult.
This is more than a disagreement about a joke. It raises a fundamental question about the relationship between religious morality and the way we treat other people. What does it mean to believe in a moral tradition? Is it enough to defend its rules, or must we also embody its deeper understanding of human beings?
Levy’s response points toward an answer rooted in Judaism itself. And the same ethic is woven throughout Schitt’s Creek, the television series he co-created, wrote, and starred in. Its central moral vision is that people deserve love, respect, and the opportunity to be seen as fully human, including when they differ from us, disappoint us, or challenge our assumptions about how life ought to be lived.
The Jewish meaning of human dignity
Judaism does not require everyone to agree about morality, religion, sexuality, or the obligations of a traditional life. Orthodox Judaism maintains particular commitments concerning modesty, marriage, sex, and religious observance. Those commitments can be held seriously without turning people who live differently into objects of ridicule.
At the heart of Jewish thought is b’tzelem Elokim: the teaching that human beings are created in the image of God. In Genesis, this principle establishes human dignity before any individual has demonstrated virtue, acquired status, or earned the approval of others. A person’s worth is not simply a reward for behaving correctly according to someone else’s standards.
The implications are profound. We can disagree with another person’s choices without reducing that person to those choices. We can believe an action is wrong without deciding that the person who performs it is unworthy of respect. We can maintain religious boundaries without using humiliation as a means of enforcing them.
This is not an argument that Judaism has no moral rules or that every behavior must be affirmed. It is an argument that moral judgment and human dignity must coexist. Jewish tradition contains extensive debates about obligation, accountability, repentance, and the treatment of others. Its ethical demands cannot be reduced to a list of prohibitions while the obligations governing our relationships with other human beings are treated as secondary.
The Torah repeatedly commands care for the stranger, reminding the Jewish people that they themselves knew what it meant to live as strangers in Egypt. The prohibition against humiliating another person, the obligations of charity and justice, and the rabbinic emphasis on the dignity of human beings all point toward a morality that extends beyond the enforcement of rules. How we treat people matters, including people whose lives do not resemble our own.
That is the Jewish perspective I see reflected in Levy’s response to Gillis. He did not have to agree with every woman’s clothing choice to reject the degradation of women who make it. He did not have to share their experiences to recognize the injustice of the language directed at them. He began with their humanity rather than with a judgment about whether they deserved his defense.
The moral universe of Schitt’s Creek
This ethic is not incidental to Schitt’s Creek. It is one of the series’ defining features.
The show begins with a family that has spent its life insulated by wealth and accustomed to viewing other people through the lens of status, taste, and social position. When the Roses lose their fortune, they are forced to live in a town they once regarded as an embarrassment. Their new neighbors seem strange to them. Their circumstances are unfamiliar, their manners often irritate them, and their lives do not conform to the Roses’ expectations.
The comedy depends on these differences. But the show’s moral development depends on something else: the gradual discovery that the people the Roses initially dismiss possess inner lives, loyalties, vulnerabilities, and capacities for love that cannot be measured by wealth or social standing.
The Roses do not become better people because everyone around them suddenly becomes sophisticated or begins to resemble them. They grow because they form relationships with people they would previously have overlooked. They learn to recognize value where they had once seen only inadequacy.
This is a distinctly important moral distinction. It is easy to respect people who confirm our existing judgments. It is harder to respect those who unsettle our assumptions, whose manners irritate us, whose choices we would never make, or whose lives fall outside our definition of what is normal.
Schitt’s Creek repeatedly finds its emotional power in that second kind of encounter. Its characters are allowed to be ridiculous without being reduced to their ridiculousness. They can be selfish, insecure, vain, or confused without being permanently defined by their worst qualities. The possibility of growth remains open.
The show does not abolish judgment. It makes judgment less final.
That is a powerful moral proposition: people are more than the categories through which we first encounter them.
David Rose and the freedom to be fully human
David Rose is especially important to this vision. He is witty, defensive, particular, and frequently self-absorbed. He can be dismissive of people who do not share his tastes or understand his sensibilities. He is not introduced as a model of perfect empathy.
Yet his story is not an exercise in forcing him to renounce his identity. His development occurs through relationships that allow him to become more open, more trusting, and more capable of giving and receiving love.
His sexuality is central to this point. David is pansexual, and the series treats this as an ordinary part of who he is rather than as a moral defect, a social threat, or a problem that other characters must solve. His famous wine analogy with Stevie makes the subject funny and accessible without turning his sexuality into an object of disgust.
The scene works because the humor comes from David’s personality and the awkwardness of the conversation, not from the idea that he is somehow less deserving of love or respect because of whom he can love.
His relationship with Patrick develops the same principle. David is not required to become a different person before he can be loved. He is challenged, understood, accepted, and gradually changed by the experience of a relationship in which vulnerability does not have to be hidden behind sarcasm.
There is an important distinction here between acceptance and moral indifference. The series does not suggest that people have nothing to learn from one another or that every behavior is beyond criticism. It suggests that growth becomes possible within relationships that preserve a person’s dignity.
Love is not presented as a prize awarded to those who have finally corrected every imperfection. It is part of the process through which people become more fully themselves.
That understanding has a natural affinity with the Jewish insistence on the inherent dignity of the human being. A person’s worth does not begin only after that person has satisfied someone else’s expectations. Human dignity is the starting point, not the final reward.
The difference between judging conduct and judging a person
Return to the gym controversy.
A person can believe that modesty is a virtue. An Orthodox Jew can maintain traditional standards of dress. Someone can argue that contemporary culture places excessive emphasis on physical appearance or sexual display. Those are arguments that can be made without calling women who dress differently “whores.”
The word does more than express disapproval of clothing. It assigns a degrading identity to the person wearing it. It replaces a discussion of conduct with a judgment about the woman’s worth and character.
Levy’s response exposes that distinction. The women do not become less worthy of respect because their clothing fails someone else’s test of modesty. Nor does a man’s reaction to their appearance establish a moral obligation on their part to prevent him from making a degrading judgment.
Shapiro’s defense of the joke moved the discussion in the opposite direction. By scrutinizing women’s clothing and emphasizing the predictability of male responses, he made the women’s appearance central to explaining the insult directed at them. Levy instead made the insult—and the men choosing to use it—the focus of moral scrutiny.
That difference is precisely why Levy’s intervention matters. He did not have to establish that every outfit was appropriate or that modesty was an illegitimate concern. He identified a more basic failure: the assumption that disagreement with a woman’s choices licenses contempt for the woman herself.
The same principle extends far beyond clothing. A Christian’s beliefs do not become meaningless because a Jew rejects the divinity of Jesus. A transgender person’s humanity does not disappear because someone disputes their understanding of sex and gender. Palestinian civilians do not lose their moral significance because Israel is fighting Hamas. A woman who alleges sexual assault does not forfeit her dignity because her sexual history becomes controversial or her account is disputed.
In each case, there are legitimate questions that can be examined: theological disagreements, contested claims, scientific evidence, military objectives, and the facts of an alleged crime. Respecting human dignity does not require us to abandon those inquiries or predetermine their conclusions. It requires us to distinguish the evaluation of a claim from the degradation of the person making it.
That is the distinction Schitt’s Creek understands so well. Its characters can disagree, misunderstand one another, and behave badly. Yet the possibility of recognition, reconciliation, and growth remains. No character must first become an idealized version of someone else’s preferred human being to be worthy of consideration.
A morality measured by how we treat people
There is a reason the contrast between Levy and Shapiro is so revealing. Shapiro’s public identity emphasizes the defense of traditional family life and religious values. Levy’s work, by contrast, demonstrates a moral sensibility that does not depend on everyone sharing his identity or worldview.
Their difference in this controversy is not evidence that one sexual orientation produces greater compassion than another. It is evidence that a person’s identity and professed convictions do not automatically determine how that person will treat others. A heterosexual defender of traditional values can fail to show consideration for women, just as a gay man can recognize and defend their dignity. The relevant question is what each person actually does.
Levy’s response also offers a useful corrective to the idea that respect for people whose lives differ from ours is necessarily an expression of secular progressivism in opposition to religious tradition. The principle that people possess dignity beyond their conformity to our expectations is not foreign to Judaism. It is deeply compatible with the Jewish understanding of the human being as created in the image of God.
The point is not to declare Levy a religious authority or to claim that a television comedy captures the entirety of Jewish ethics. It is to recognize that his public response and the moral world of Schitt’s Creek express a principle that Jewish tradition has long had the language to articulate: the humanity of another person is not ours to revoke.
We do not have to approve of every choice to treat the person making it with respect. We do not have to share another person’s experience to care about their suffering. We do not have to surrender our convictions to recognize that another human being is more than the category into which we have placed them.
And we cannot establish our own moral seriousness merely by pointing to the people we believe are wrong.
The Jewish ethic of human dignity asks something more difficult. It asks us to carry our convictions into the way we speak, the judgments we make, and the treatment we extend to people who cannot offer us agreement, status, or anything else in return.
Dan Levy’s response to Gillis was brief, but the principle behind it is substantial. His work on Schitt’s Creek gives that principle a fuller expression: a world in which people are permitted to be complicated, imperfect, different, and still deserving of love and respect.
That is not the absence of morality. It is morality expressed through our relationships with other human beings.
And it is a Jewish ideal worth defending.
