By Henry Fowler, Stevensville
One year ago this month, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed The Equality Act. Every Democrat voted for the bill. It’s the LGBT lobby’s chief legislative goal because it writes transgender ideology into federal law and imposes this radical gender ideology on the country.
If signed into law, the Act would add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as protected classes under federal civil rights law. The term “gender identity” means “the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.” That means a biological male who “identifies” as a female is a female even in the absence of any sex “reassignment” surgery and the same for a biological female who “identifies” as a male.
The Equality Act would threaten the privacy, safety, and equality of women and girls across the country. It would require all schools and businesses to open their women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and sports teams to boys who “identify” as girls and to men who “identify” as women. (By allowing biological males to compete as females in sex-specific sports, the Act would defeat the entire purpose of Title IX, which was meant to ensure that women would have the same opportunities as men in sports.) It would also require prisons to transfer male inmates who “identify” as women to a women’s prison. Because the Act would outlaw safe spaces for women, predators will take advantage of the law to gain access to victims.
The Equality Act would require a variety of small business owners (such as florists, bakers, photographers) to violate their sincerely-held religious beliefs about marriage, sexuality, and gender. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 would be no defense. Even the failure to use somebody’s “preferred pronouns” would be considered a hate crime.
The Equality Act would require employers to pay for sex “reassignment” procedures in their health insurance plans and require hospitals and doctors to perform them. It would also normalize hormonal and surgical interventions for gender dysphoric children as well as indoctrination on transgender ideology in schools and other public venues (e.g., Drag Queen Story Hours). If parents do not consent to giving their gender dysphoric children puberty-blocking drugs, the parents will lose custody.
The Equality Act would require faith-based adoption and foster care agencies to either violate their conviction that every child deserves both a mother and a father or to stop serving children in need altogether. Also at risk are charities that provide shelter for homeless, abused, and trafficked woman because men who “identify” as women will be entitled to entry to these shelters.
The Equality Act threatens the freedom of speech, freedom of association, and free exercise of religion of countless people. It would empower the government to impose a radical ideology on how we think, speak, and act at home, at school, at work, and at play. Any dissent from transgender ideology would be considered a hate crime or hate speech. Such totalitarianism is a danger to our freedoms.
More alarming is that every 2020 Democratic presidential candidate supports the Equality Act. The presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, tweeted in January 2020: “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.” Rule by Democrats means the reign of transgender ideology.