Issue
Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity Laws
SOGI LAWS 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;
- Open dorms so that your daughter’s roommate would be determined by gender identity, not by sex;
- Allow men who identify as women to compete in women’s sports and enter women’s shelters; open bathrooms, changing areas, and showers to the opposite sex and force residential programs like group homes and inpatient substance abuse programs to house residents by gender-identity rather than sex;
- Give government teeth to cancel culture to punish those who believe in traditional marriage and biological sex and treat them by law as equivalent to those with racist beliefs.
- Punish wedding service providers who choose not to participate in same-sex weddings that violate their conscience.
- Force doctors to remove healthy body parts from those who want genderreassignment surgery and force doctors to stop the puberty of children and inject opposite sex hormones into kids;
The Harms of Sexual Orientation & 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.
Here is a video of a Democrat state representative in her own words promising that they will use this law to go after doctors, nurses, and Catholic hospitals.
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.
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