The So-Called Equality Act Harms the Vulnerable and Strips Away Religious Freedom

Mar 23, 2021 | 4 comments

The Equality Act is an effort to create a special class in law based on sexual orientation and gender identity/expression (SOGI), which would penalize Americans for their beliefs about marriage and biological sex.  Even without such laws, large corporations and academia have been busy “cancelling” contrary viewpoints on issues of human sexuality. The Equality Act accelerates that treatment and gives governmental teeth to the cancel culture to punish anyone who disagrees with LGBT activists’ view of human sexuality.

Employment, housing, and public accommodations should not be denied to someone for arbitrary reasons, regardless of whether a person is in a protected class or not. But the so-called Equality Act does a lot more than the scenarios we sometimes have in mind. For instance, biological sex matters in the shared housing contexts like dormitories, camps, or women’s homeless shelters. Yet, The Equality Act would open up these places, as well as locker rooms, showers, changing areas, and women’s sports based on how a person self-identifies rather than on biological sex.  

The so-called Equality Act makes it illegal for religious organizations to hire all their employees based on whether they believe and seek to live consistent with the religious organization’s teaching on human sexuality. 

The Equality Act can also be used to force medical professionals into performing hysterectomies and mastectomies on healthy girls. A Catholic hospital has already been sued for declining to perform a double mastectomy on a gender dysphoric sixteen-year old girl. It would also harm families and kids by normalizing hormonal and surgical interventions for gender dysphoric children.

Powerful market and cultural forces are deterring real discrimination against anyone simply because they identify as gay or transgender. Discrimination laws are supposed to be shields from invidious discrimination, but the Equality Act would be used as a sword to punish good people and ministries for their beliefs about human sexuality. Employees or business owners who recognize the two biological sexes or that believe in traditional marriage would be treated by law as equivalent to those holding racist beliefs. Instead, our laws should honor the freedom to hold different beliefs in order to respect true diversity and tolerance. 

Specifically, the Equality Act will

  • Punish religious employers, like Catholic and Christian schools, if they decline to hire a person who disagrees with church teaching on issues of human sexuality and marriage;
  • Open up dorms so that your daughter’s roommate would be determined by gender identity, not by biological sex;  
  • Open up women’s shelters to men who identify as women; 
  • Force residential programs like group homes and in-patient substance abuse programs to house residents by gender-identity rather than sex; 
  • Open bathrooms, changing areas, and showers to the opposite sex;  
  • Allow men who identify as women to compete in women’s sports;  
  • Shut down religious foster care if such agencies seek to exclusively place children in homes with a mother and father;  
  • Force doctors to remove healthy body parts from those who want gender-reassignment surgery; 
  • Force doctors to stop the puberty of children and inject opposite sex hormones into kids; 
  • Punish wedding service providers who choose not to participate in same-sex weddings that violate their conscience.
  • Prohibit counselors, therapists, psychiatrists, and mental health professoinals from helping clients reach their own goals fo overcoming unwanted same-sex attractions and gender confusion.

It’s not too late to take a stand against this bill and be a voice for women, children, female athletes, and religious freedom. Click here for more details and to contact your Senator and them to vote no. Also, be sure to share this with friends and family!