The Equality Act was jointly introduced in both the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate on March 13, 2019, with the support of both Democratic and Republican members of Congress, national civil rights organizations (including the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League and the Human Rights Campaign), international human rights organizations (including Human Rights Watch), major professional associations (including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Counseling Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the American Bar Association), and major businesses including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, IBM, Facebook, Twitter, Visa, Mastercard, Intel, and Netflix).
In a statement celebrating the Equality Act’s reintroduction, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made this be known:
“To dismantle the discrimination undermining our democracy, we must ensure that all Americans, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, are treated equally under the law — not just in the workplace, but in education, housing, credit, jury service and public accommodations as well.”
Nancy Pelosi’s Democrat-majority House has been pushing the Equality Act (H.R. 5) since their first days in power. It is slated to come to the House floor the week of May 13. This proposed law would add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act. While the legislation has been introduced in Congress for years, it never had a real shot at passage before. Now it does. In the House, the legislation has been cosponsored by 240 members –a rock solid majority with more than enough votes to pass the bill right now. Known as S. 788 in the Senate, it has 46 cosponsors, including one liberal Republican, putting it perilously close to the 51 sponsors needed for a majority.
The Equality Act would unleash federal persecution of Christians. As is often the case with the titles of U.S. legislation, the Equality Act would do the opposite of its stated goal. In this case, the act should be called the anti-Christian Act. Bryan Fischer, host of the daily ‘Focal Point’ radio talk program on AFR Talk, a division of the American Family Association, has this to say of the misnamed Equality Act: It’s not the Equality Act, it’s the Pedophile Protection Act.
As explained by Alex Newman in an article appearing in The New American dated May 6, 2019:
Almost half of states and hundreds of local governments have adopted laws enshrining “sexual orientation and gender identity” protections. But under this bill, the policy would go national, and would be forced on churches, domestic-abuse shelters, Christian schools, and much more.
The Equality Act specifically states that religious freedom may not be used as a defense under the bill. The legislation would apply to churches, religious schools, religious hospitals, religious employers, gathering places, sports, all government, all government entities and more. Christian adoption agencies would be shut down if they refuse to place children with homosexuals or individuals confused about whether they are men or women, which has already happened in states with similar legislation. Outside of some tiny and very narrow exemptions, churches, synagogues, and mosques will no longer be able to uphold marriage between men and women, or any moral standards on sexuality at all.
Counselors of faith will be banned from helping people with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender confusion. Everyone will have to affirm the LGBT agenda, or face persecution and destruction at the hands of the federal government. Churches will lose their tax-exempt status if they do no submit. Schools will lose their accreditation if they do not bow down to LGBT extremism.
Furthermore, men who claim they “identify” as women will be allowed to use women’s restrooms, showers, and changing area. This is already happening in government schools and some radical businesses such as Target, putting women and girls at risk.
The legislation would also make it mandatory that men who claim to identify as women be allowed to compete in women’s sports, all but ensuring that no biological woman or girl will ever win another sporting competition.
Equality Act as a blunt force weapon
The nonprofit Christian legal group Liberty Counsel called the wrongly named Equality Act the “most extreme threat to religious freedom, free speech, privacy, and to women’s rights that has ever been proposed in Congress.” As said by Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver:
“The Equality Act is not about equality. This bill eviscerated religious freedom and targets churches with an LGBT wrecking ball. This bill pushes the LGBT agenda on all people and targets Christianity in every area of life—including the church. There also will be an increase of sexual assaults when males ‘identifying as females’ are allowed to use girls and women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. We will see an increase of instances where Christians and others are being punished unless they violate their beliefs in order to comply with such a law. And that is just the beginning of unconstitutional chaos in America.”
According to Monica Burke, a noted research assistant with the Center for Religion and Civil Society at Heritage:
“These policies are not being used to promote equality. Instead, they are being used as a blunt-force weapon to ban disagreement on marriage and sexuality by punishing dissenters.”
In Europe pastors and evangelists are already being arrested and jailed for pointing out that the God of the Bible condemns homosexuality as sinful, and that God made people either male and female. America is not there yet but the Equality Act would be a giant step in that direction.
The bill is so radical that even some homosexual activists such as Gregory Angelo, a communications consultant based in Washington, D.C. and the former president of Log Cabin Republicans, are opposed to it. In a piece for the Washington Examiner, Don’t be fooled by the name, Angelo wrote:
“The Equality Act is legislation that would compromise American civil rights and religious liberty as we know it.”
Gender-identity laws and economics
As noted by Peter Sprigg,Senior Fellow for Policy Studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council:
”Some advocates argue that gender-identity laws benefit the economy as a whole. We can test that proposition empirically. Twenty of the 50 states already have sexual orientation-gender identity laws for employment, public accommodations, and housing. In other words, protections very similar to those the Equality Act would impose nationally. Do those 20 states have an economic advantage over the 30 states that have declined to adopt such laws?
The answer, in brief, is no. A simple internet search reveals a number of different cumulative rankings as well as individual statistics by which to measure the economic health of a state. However, none of them shows any clear advantage for states with sexual orientation-gender identity laws.
How about unemployment? If businesses are fleeing states that lack these laws in favor of those that have them, perhaps they are leaving more unemployed workers behind them. Yet again, there seems to be no correlation: Six of the 12 states with the lowest unemployment rates (as of February 2019) have sexual orientation-gender identity laws, but so do 6 of the 12 with the highest unemployment.
A final data point might be economic growth itself. Do gender identity states have better growth rates of gross domestic product? According to data for the full year of 2017, only six sexual orientation-gender identity states exceeded the U.S. national growth rate of 2.1%, while 14 such states were below it.
The empirical evidence simply shows no strong correlation between the existence of such laws and the health of a state’s, or a nation’s, economy.”
Uncertain future
What Trump might do remains a mystery, should the Equality bill pass both houses of Congress. It would seem hard for Trump to betray his base among Christian conservatives, but there are senior officials who have announced a push to legalize sodomy and homosexuality around the world. Big Business is also fully on board with massive support.
Please CALL and EMAIL your representative today to voice your view on this amendment that would put Americans’ liberties at risk.
Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121
