The Equality Act of 2021 threatens religious freedom, the freedom of association, and denies biological reality. The authors of the bill claim its purpose is to protect the rights of the LGBTQ community. In reality, the bill uses group identity and government-given rights to violate the God-given individual rights of Americans. The bill amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which had as its purpose reversing generations of segregation laws and their negative consequences.
The bill adds sexual orientation and gender identity as banned forms of discrimination. In the United States, however, there are no laws that treat homosexual or heterosexual Americans differently. All persons have the same God-given rights and those rights are equally protected by the Constitution. The Equality Act is social engineering designed to “perfect” society in the eyes of its authors and to root out cultural beliefs that the authors hold in contempt. Such social engineering is inherently tyrannical, and history shows such uses of governmental power go badly.
The bill begins with unusual “findings” that are, in reality, a set of unsupported grievances.
The bill proclaims that members of the “LGBTQ” community are subject to “widespread discrimination” in “public accommodations” and “employment” and then makes the strange leap of linking these to historical discrimination against women. While women were subject to generations of unequal treatment under the law in areas such as employment, education access, and the right to vote among others, no such unequal treatment is present under the law in regards to sexual orientation.
Religious Freedom in the Crosshairs
The bill lists these grievances but is rooted in group identity politics and seeks to use government-given group identity victim “rights” that, at the same time, serve to deny the God-given rights of all Americans.
For instance, faith-based adoption agencies would no longer be allowed to follow the guidance of beliefs but would be forced to shut down or do things contrary to their faith in violation of their freedom of religion.
The bill bans “conversion therapy” but fails to define conversion therapy, leaving it to executive agencies to define it as they see fit. Thus, the executive branch would have broad authority to use this power in dangerous ways. Faith-based counselors would be subject to government action for counseling in favor of sexual relations only within the bounds of the marriage of one man and one woman. Even preaching or witnessing the biblical truth that Jesus’s blood can deliver any person from any bondage including any sexual bondage might be considered outside the bounds of this provision.
The bill does not contain any religious exemption and sponsors of the bill are proud of the lack of any such exemption. “Every scoundrel in American history has tried to dress up his or her opposition to other people’s civil rights in religious garb,” said Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). “Their real argument, the only honest argument, is that they believe LGBT people are morally inferior and that firing us should be permitted,” said Representative Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.).
The bill would require employers, institutions of learning, and public accommodations to accept any person’s processed “gender identity” regardless of the biological reality. Therefore, everyone in effect would be forced to accept the lies that gender is mutable and even extends beyond male and female to an open-ended number of fictional possibilities. Thus, God-given freedoms of speech and association would be crushed.
Rejecting Biological Reality
The bill mandates that schools and sports organizations allow persons to compete in sports based on their gender identity rather than the biological reality. Therefore, males claiming to be females would be free to fully invade women’s sports. Martina Navratilova, retired tennis great and gay rights activist, has warned of the danger to female sports from such “absolute transgender equity.” This bill mandates absolute transgender equity and represents the imposing of ideology and rejection of biological reality.
The bill forces hospitals to provide sex-change treatments and surgeries and force insurance companies to cover said treatments and surgeries. A faith-based hospital would not be given any exception in cases violating their freedom of religion. Further, there is widespread opposition within the medical community today against the increasing number of sex-change treatments, especially on minors. The bill seeks to silence the freedom of conscience of members of the medical community.
The Equality Act also overrides parental sovereignty rights. The bill forbids parents from protecting their own minor children from sex-change treatments. Thus, the decisions are left only to a minor child not old enough to make such life-changing decisions and an irresponsible medical provider. No responsible medical provider would wish to conduct such treatments on a minor against the will of a parent. The rejection of parental sovereignty shows how the bill is based on a worldview that the state is the central institution of society and does not have to respect the authority of any other institution. Directly rejected are the foundational institutions of the family and faith.
No Relief from the Courts
The Equality Act represents the reality that America has truly become a postmodern society. The bill rejects not just truth and morality but reason and scientific evidence in favor of ideology and group victim identity rights. The bill is designed to use said group identity rights to crush individual liberties and enable the state to reshape mankind as it wills.
Such an agenda shows the bill is rooted in the Hegelian belief that the nature of man is mutable and the state is the institution that can perfect mankind. History has shown over and over again that this idea is false and all attempts by the state to perfect mankind result in tyranny and great suffering.
Americans cannot look to the Supreme Court for protection. The Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton not only rewrote the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include gay rights but recognized a male identifying as female as a female. The Supreme Court has embraced the falsehoods of the current era and done so with self-righteous zeal. The majority was 6-3 including two “conservatives”—Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissent praised the triumph of gay rights in the majority and ignored the fact that popular opinion had embraced a complete denial of reality.
Believers and conservatives must return to the embrace of the first principles of the founders and must do so in both the cultural and political realms. All mankind is made in the image of God and that is the source of our rights and those rights are individual, not group-based rights. Government has the limited role of protecting God-given liberty and cannot make mankind better. Character is destiny for nations and individuals.
Truth is real and we all must speak the truth. Only the truth has the real power to drive back the darkness and transform our culture and restore our republic.