Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Laws

Efforts to create a special class in law based on sexual orientation and gender identity/expression (SOGI) 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. SOGI laws at state and local levels accelerate that treatment and give government teeth to the cancel culture to punish people who disagree 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 these laws do 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 SOGI laws are intended to open up these places, as well as locker rooms, showers, changing areas, and women’s sports based on how a person identifies rather than on biological sex. SOGI laws make 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.
These laws are 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. SOGI laws 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 SOGI laws are used as swords 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.