Making
LGBT a Protected Class Will Kill Religious Liberty,By T.R. Clancy,
6/26/19.
The
current campaign to amend federal and state civil rights laws to extend protections
to sexual orientation and gender identity isn't meant to eliminate
discrimination. It's meant to eliminate religious freedom. What else are we to
believe when proponents of such amendments tell us as much?
Earlier
this month, Michigan State Senator Jeremy Moss introduced legislation to amend the state's civil rights
law to add sexual orientation and sexual identity as protected
classes. One of the main objections to changing the law before now
has been the harm it must do to conscience protections and the free exercise of
religion. Like their federal cousin, the Equality Act, these laws can't ensure equality
because, as gay writer Brad Polumbo explains, they work by
"elevating [LGBT] rights over those of religious
Americans."
Senator
Moss isn't even pretending this isn't the case. As reported in
the Oakland Press, Moss said: The legislation will not make exceptions for
those whose religious beliefs condemn homosexuality and other lifestyles. That
would mean, for example, that a Catholic school that teaches against
homosexuality could not discriminate against a homosexual job applicant on the
basis of sexual orientation.
Bakery owners and photographers could
not refuse to serve a same-sex couple's wedding on the basis of their religious
beliefs.
None
of this bothers Moss, who "says he is gay as well as a practicing
Jew," and doesn't see what the problem is. He "knows
plenty of rabbis and other religious leaders who support the
legislation." Besides, believers who don't see it his way just
don't understand the Bible, or their own faith: "A few passages in the Old
Testament (teaching against homosexuality) don't give people the right to
discriminate. I don't believe there is a conflict between religious values and
treating everyone fairly."
And
if it turns out there is a conflict between Moss's ideas
about "treating everyone fairly" and someone's religious values, then
we'll just ignore the religious values. As David Harsanyi recently noted
at The Federalist, "compelling the right kind of speech no longer
seems a bothersome prospect to most progressives. Any neutral principles that
are inherent in the First Amendment have long been discarded for more pressing
matters of social justice." How else could Moss write a law
that forces a Catholic school principal to
hire a homosexual teacher whose lifestyle contradicts Catholic teaching,
and forces a Christian baker to design a cake
with a message the baker considers sinful?
It
would also mean that, as is already happening in states that include gender
identity as a protected class, Catholic hospitals could be sued "for 'discrimination' on the
basis of gender identity because they wouldn't perform sex-change surgeries for
patients with gender dysphoria."
The
Supreme Court of British Columbia applied similar gender equality dogma when it "declared a
father guilty of family violence for his polite refusal to refer to his 14-year
old daughter as a boy in private, and his repeated choice to affirm in media
interviews that she is a girl." The judge went so far as to order the father's immediate
arrest by any B.C. cop who merely suspects him
of referring to his daughter as a girl — anywhere in public or
private — including uttering her birth name. And, "politicizing
the medical treatment of gender dysphoria could lead to
more prosecutions against parents who refuse to aid in the sterilization of
their children," as happened recently in Ohio, and they haven't even added gender orientation to their
civil rights law — yet. The Ohio judge took into account that the
parents' unwillingness that their daughter undergo hormone treatments that will
sterilize her "was based at least in part on the parents' Christian
beliefs."
What
if their objections were based in part on their Christian
beliefs? Wouldn't most atheist parents react the same? Or
are we supposed to believe that only parents who recite the Apostles' Creed or
believe in the story of Adam and Eve would think of standing in the way of
their daughter being robbed of all possibility of motherhood through some
insane experiment that will never turn her into a boy?
The
amount of irrationality needed to justify the normalizing of homosexuality and
transgenderism is leading to the astonishing result that it's the religious
believers, and not the agnostic scientists, who are inheriting the guardianship
of empirical reality. Far-fetched as some people may find the story
of Noah's Ark or the doctrine of the Last Judgment, those of us who believe
these things are still perfectly capable of recognizing nature and the laws of
nature for what they are here on Earth. We're not the ones, in other
words, who believe that little girls are regularly being born trapped inside
the bodies of little boys, or that a man can change himself into a woman, or
that a pregnant woman can transform the living being inside her from a human
into a disposable appendage, just by choosing it to be so. Whatever
the source of these fables — self-serving metaphysics or the devil in hell — it
isn't science.
It's
taken a special kind of intellectual breakdown for our society to blind itself
to visible concrete realities for the sake of invisible and imaginary
ones. Maybe 40 years of rationalizing the slaughter of the unborn
with the antiscientific lie that we don't know when a human life begins made it
an easy lie to tell that a man can be made into a woman by means of hormone
injections and surgical mutilations.
While
judges, politicians, celebrities, academics, doctors, and psychotherapists are
repeating these lies, it's been left to religious believers to withstand
them. The Catholic Church just released educational guidelines (50 years late, but better late
than never) that state unequivocally that male-female sexuality is a
"given natural or biological fact." In the UK it was
Muslim parents who put a stop to a school program in which their
"children are being told it's OK to be gay."
And
again, though the motivations of the British Muslims and Christian parents are
in part religious, they're not doing these things to force acceptance of a
creed on someone else, just the recognition of natural facts: our daughter is
not a boy; homosexuality is not normal. Last month Pope Francis
rejected the notion that being pro-life is a religious position, arguing that
abortion is a "pre-religious problem" that "existed long before
Catholicism": "Do not blame religion for something that concerns the
human," he said. "It is not lawful. Never, ever
eliminate a human life or hire a hitman to solve a problem."
Even
when we call our hitmen "doctors," and the murders they commit "health
care." Or castration "gender transitioning."
When
the old progressives attacked religion, they mistakenly saw themselves as
defending modern science from primitive superstitions. Matthew Arnold
rejected miracles outright, and called for a critical effort, "in all branches of knowledge,
theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it
really is." But the last thing today's progressives are willing
to tolerate is anyone pointing out the object as in itself it really
is. Our best-educated professors, lawyers, and doctors refuse to
permit an unborn child to be referred to as a human baby, his bearer as a mother, or a gender dysphoric teenaged
"transgendered male" as exactly what she is: a
girl. Today's war on religious liberty isn't being waged by
clear-eyed progressives against bitter clingers determined to force their dark
superstitions on the nation; it's being waged by a radical clerisy
properly terrified that their counterfeit science is being exposed — including
by clear-eyed believers — as the superstitious mumbo-jumbo that it is.
As
Senator Moss's blatant disregard for religious liberty puts beyond doubt, the
push to re-define LGBT status as a protected class isn't about expanding
freedoms for LGBT people: it's about taking away the freedoms of religious
believers who refuse to deny what we all know about the facts of life.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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