House and Senate Democrats reintroduce anti-religious liberty, pro-LGBT Equality Act
Democrats in both the House and the Senate celebrated “Pride” last month by reintroducing the anti-religious liberty, pro-LGBT Equality Act.
The Equality Act is a proposal to extend federal nondiscrimination protections to LGBTQ Americans by amending the Civil Rights Act to include the entirety of the pro-LGBT (via TheHill.com):
The Equality Act would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, economic status, sex and national origin, to further prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.
House and Senate Democrats said the legislation is necessary to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination against the backdrop of rising anti-LGBTQ violence, rhetoric and policies.
“We are filing this bill during Pride Month, a time of celebration but also an opportunity to reflect on a time when being out was nearly impossible,” Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), the bill’s primary sponsor in the House and one of 12 openly LGBTQ lawmakers in Congress, said during a news conference.
“We cannot allow extremists in our country to once again normalize homophobia and attacks on LGBTQ people,” Takano said in a reference to hundreds of state-level bills filed this year that target the LGBTQ community. “We can’t turn away from the discrimination that still exists for so many LGBTQ people today.”
[Senate] Democrats pointed to last year’s Respect for Marriage Act, which passed both chambers with bipartisan support, as an indicator that Congress may finally get the Equality Act across the finish line this year.
“The fight for LGBTQ+ rights has been long, but we have made unmistakable progress in the fight towards true equality,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) said Wednesday. “Just a decade ago, passing marriage equality and the Respect for Marriage Act with a dozen Republican senators on our side would have been unthinkable.”
Under the Equality Act, everyone will be required to submit to the LGBT agenda, with churches and religious employers, organizations, and colleges afforded no exceptions whatsoever. “Religion is no excuse for discrimination when it comes to sexual orientation or gender identity,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) when explaining the intention of the legislation.
Besides the clear and obvious threat to genuine civil rights and civil liberty, the Equality Act is loaded with a myriad of unintended consequences so egregious that even voices within the pro-LGBT community oppose it for reasons other than religious liberty. “It would eliminate women and girls as a coherent legal category worthy of civil rights protection,” said Julia Beck, a self-described radical lesbian feminist and the former law and policy co-chair for Baltimore’s LGBTQ Commission. (Emphasis mine)
The Equality Act has been a priority of pro-LGBT forces over the past few Congresses.
In March 2019, the House of Representatives first introduced the Equality Act (H.R. 5). The bill, which codifies the LGBT agenda, passed in the House in May 2019 but stalled in the Senate. Shortly after the 2020 election, the Equality Act was reintroduced in February 2021. Once again, it passed in the House but went nowhere in the Senate.
Though these efforts failed, momentum has clearly shifted in favor of passage.
In June 2020, the Supreme Court, led by Neil Gorsuch, made the Equality Act a moot point when he joined the majority in a 6-3 decision (Bostock v. Clayton County) to create a never-existed-before inalienable right to transgenderism in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act without providing protections for religious liberty.
In October 2020, then-candidate for President Joe Biden said in an interview with Philadelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal that passing the Equality Act was “essential to ensuring that no future president can ever again roll back civil rights and protections for LGBTQ+ individuals. It’s wrong to deny people access to services or housing because of who they are or who they love.”
Only hours after taking the oath of office, Biden issued an executive order barring discrimination based on “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.”
A few weeks later, Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken began spreading the pro-LGBT agenda globally via the State Department. Biden’s “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Persons Around the World” directed American agencies operating abroad “to ensure that United States diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons.”
Although Democrats have been the driving force behind these developments, the Equality Act was first introduced in 2019 when Republicans could have stopped it but didn’t, just as I warned would happen. In fact, Republicans supported the goals of the Equality Act, which is why they introduced a “conservative alternative” called the Fairness for All Act in December 2019.
The Fairness for All Act would also amend the Civil Rights Act using the same pro-LGBT language included in the Equality Act but with additional language that allegedly protected the convictions of religious organizations, healthcare providers, and employers with 15 employees or less.
For those who claim this wouldn’t have happened if Trump had won, let me remind you that he has always been a proponent of the LGBT agenda. Trump openly supported it as a candidate in 2016 and he continued doing so as president.
When asked by The Washington Blade about Trump’s position on the Fairness for All Act, then-White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere indicated Trump’s openness to seeing it become law:
“President Trump has protected human dignity, fought for inclusion, promoted LGBTQ Americans, and strongly protected religious freedom for everyone while in office. The White House looks forward to reviewing the legislation.”
Before Biden launched his global effort, Trump started one of his own to spread the LGBT lifestyle and normalize sexual deviancy worldwide. Former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest-profile openly homosexual person in the Trump administration, led the effort and defended LGBT deviancy as “God’s truth” in an editorial written for Bild, a German tabloid newspaper:
“While a student at Evangel University, a Christian liberal arts college in Missouri, I was taught by biblical scholars that all truth is God’s truth, no matter where it is found. The truth for LGBT people is that we were born gay.”
As Trump’s senior adviser focused on outreach to LGBT voters in 2020, Grenell released a video ad declaring his boss “the most pro-gay president in American history.” Trump retweeted Grenell’s declaration, calling it a “great honor.”
The evolution from ignoring things done “between two consenting adults in private” to government-enforced, mandatory acceptance of sexual deviancy is here,
The pro- LGBT Equality Act will destroy religious liberty, just as we knew would happen following the Obergefell decision. And the casualties left in the rubble of this persistent march toward Sodom — Christians, conservatives, and the Constitution — continue to pile up.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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