Article by Joy Pullmann in The Federalist
There Is No Way To ‘Fix’ The Equality Act. It’s Identity Politics Or Equality Before The Law, And Republicans Must Choose
On May 15, Fox News reported that three Republican senators would like to write caveats into the Equality Act that might give them the political cover to vote for the bill to criminalize free speech and Christianity in the United States.
“Representatives from the offices of Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C.; Rob Portman, R-Ohio and Susan Collins, R-Maine, met with groups including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council and American Principles Project, sources said.”
FRC President Tony Perkins says that wasn’t his group’s goal for the meetings at all. Orthodox faith groups don’t want to be bamboozled into appearing to support a “compromise” on a bill that legally advantages LGBT people to make Christians second-class American citizens and punish free speech, both constitutionally protected rights.
Discussing the myriad of threats contained in the Equality Act w. Senate staff isn’t the equivalent of crafting a compromise bill. There can be NO COMPROMISE on the 1st Amendment. It is for every American & cannot be limited to religious orgs or churches. https://t.co/bfvnZuuugk
— Tony Perkins (@tperkins) May 15, 2021
The goal of these discussions, Fox’s sources claim, is to essentially pass a federal law that secures legal preferences for LGBT people while making carve-outs for religious groups. The Equality Act and its weaker competitor, The Fairness For All Act, both would permanently enshrine in federal law President Biden’s executive orders that transgender and de-gender everything the federal government touches, which by now is most of society.
The point of this maneuver is obvious: to fool the religious Americans who largely vote Republican into continuing to do so while Republicans actively undermine their interests and the Constitution.
Pretending a “compromise” is possible here is a fool’s errand in more ways than one. Fundamentally, it’s foolish because it’s not possible to both uphold the U.S. Constitution and the identity politics regime. The two are fundamentally irreconcilable, as Christopher Caldwell explains in detail. The only option is to choose which master Americans will be forced to serve: Ordered freedom or sexual chaos.
The libertarian-minded — or those who use libertarian-sounding arguments to provide cover for Republicans to collude with Democrats in destroying the Constitution — have always proclaimed they don’t care what people do in their personal lives. That’s been a strawman this whole time, and this discussion illuminates that fact.
Percentage-wise, essentially none of the modern LGBT legal enterprise has been about simply protecting what a tiny minority of people do in private. For one thing, natural rights don’t stop being legally enforceable once you enter a private domain. One’s natural right to life, for example, is justly protected also in the privacy of one’s home.
For another thing, none of LGBT political efforts have been about private matters. They have been about public matters, such as whether the state grants marriage certificates or will assign children to a certain home, or will allow people to manufacture children to order that they cannot generate with their own bodies.
Statistically speaking, nobody wants gay people forced to die alone without their families, or denied health insurance or a place to sleep at night. There are legal solutions to all such things that don’t involve erasing women’s sports and forcing Christian churches to be bankrupted by lawsuits from anti-religious cranks with axes to grind.
Nobody supports extreme caricatures like police bursting into gay men’s homes at night while they sleep peacefully. That didn’t even happen to known homosexuals in the “bad old” “repressive” Victorian days of Oscar Wilde, who was actually prosecuted because his sexual appetite started consuming children. He lived under an avowedly Christian regime and he was allowed to groom and molest minors with frankly mild consequences.
And some sort of revival of Victorian morality is nowhere near imminent. Anyone who thinks otherwise lives in the Upside Down. So all this “Handmaids Tale” hysteria about the “religious right’s” hatred for gay people is, quite frankly, a giant smear job designed to foment hatred.
Yes, there are inconsiderate and insensitive people in every group, but as a mass Christians love gay and transgender people just like we do every other sinner on the planet, which is every single person who exists, including ourselves. It’s part of our religion to do that, okay?
Kindness and goodwill are not the issue here, the issue is legalized discrimination designed to end Americans’ constitutionally protected rights to freely associate, speak, and worship. It is a question of which of two irreconcilable sexual regimes Americans will live within, and which is best for the whole of us. The more we can be distracted into arguing about alleged bigotry and meanness, the less we focus on this paramount question. For some that is a goal, and it’s worth pondering why.
Furthermore, if any side of this dispute has been invading privacy, it has been the LGBT activist side. LGBT activists aggressively use state power to invade others’ privacy, such as in forcing men into women’s showers and sports teams, conscripting people to bake cakes and express messages with flowers, and making people unemployable for privately disagreeing with their theology.
All Christians ask of LGBT representatives is what they claim to want from us: that we be allowed to live freely in accord with our beliefs. It seems that is too much for those using the LGBT issue to achieve larger goals of erasing what remains of Americans’ constitutional protections.
Enshrining legal preferences for same-sex masturbation, politically selected racial groups, biological sex, and the rest of the identity politics mess of pottage creates a direct and unresolvable conflict with the American Constitution’s promise of representative self-government with the sole legitimate purpose of securing our natural rights.
Why do natural rights matter? Because, like the description of humankind as male and female, they truthfully reflect and befit human nature and our ordered cosmos. To attempt to sidestep the truths they reflect is to war against human nature itself, like LGBT ideology. To do that makes people unhappy, no matter how much soma you hand out to try to make them feel otherwise.
When social conflict includes deliberately fomented sexual chaos that makes the majority incapable of living a coherent and self-governing life, you don’t have a country any more, you have an asylum. The more people feel as if they are living in an asylum, the less they will commit to ensuring its continued existence.
“Accommodation” of LGBT demands has already made religious and science-believing Americans second-class citizens. Passing any federal sexual orientation and gender preference law like the Equality Act would only increase legal discrimination in the United States against those who maintain centuries-old religious traditions.
I recently discussed with a long-time military officer who worked for years at the Pentagon the new U.S. military and intelligence agency ads promoting extremist identity politics. He told me it’s now difficult for Christians to be promoted even to low-ranking officer positions due to their religious and scientific commitments about what male and female are. Making a generalship is now completely out of the question. Last week’s ousting of Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier over his opposition to Marxism — an official U.S. government position! — only accents this reality.
In other words, because of its support for LGBT ideology, the U.S. military de facto discriminates against Christians. This is an open secret in the ranks. It’s not any kind of secret if you, like I, have occasionally read military press materials in the past decade. The U.S. military expends huge amounts of taxpayer resources to affirm and promote destructive identity politics. Making taxpayers pay for transgender treatments is only the tip of this existential threat to our nation that prioritizes PR over effectiveness and politicizes the military.
This same institution of glass ceilings and “don’t ask don’t tell” policies for Christians in the military is rapidly rolling out across other sectors of public life. If Democrats’ policies and cultural norms expand, Christian health professionals will also face systemic institutionalized discrimination. Christian educators and students already do. The end of creating and amplifying “protected classes” is government-enforced social Balkanization. I shouldn’t have to point out how deeply dangerous this is.
What we need is not further legalized discrimination against politically selected classes of people, but an end to legal preferences for “protected classes” altogether. Protected classes are at odds with the moral and political commitments the United States has no identity without: equality before the law, free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, free assembly, and the acknowledgment that there is a God, and He is not our government. The United States needs to scrape off these legal barnacles, and quickly, because they’re taking down a ship that carries 330 million people’s lives.
Especially in an era in which abominations like critical race theory have made the racism, sexism, and religious bigotry of identity politics fully apparent, Republicans must abandon these horrific political principles that work to dissolve the very country they desire to lead. There can be no compromise with those whose political program requires erasing American citizens’ constitutionally guaranteed rights to freely speak and freely worship.
