Bill Donohue
President, Catholic League
President, Catholic League
Religion provides excuses for people who need excuses.
Were you ever under the impression that Christian values include the fundamental equality of all people? How about the idea that all people are born with the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Not so, according to a gaggle of right-wing extremist Christian bigots who are furious at the passing of the Equality Act by the US House yesterday. They see the LGBTQ community enjoying the same rights as them as a frontal attack on them and their faith by the Biden administration.
According to this report in the Guardian:
EQUALITY ACT IS ANTI-CHRISTIAN
According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Equality Act is “about ending discrimination”; President Joe Biden agrees. That may be its intent, but its effect is to promote the most comprehensive assault on Christianity ever written into law.
This explains why the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has been fighting this proposed law for years. Most recently it said the Equality Act “would discriminate against people of faith.” The Catholic League and many other civil rights and religious organizations have also sounded the alarm.
[...]
The Equality Act not only covers homosexuals and transgender persons, it expands public accommodations to include consumer services such as healthcare. In practice this would be a disaster. It would mean, for example, that healthcare providers would be forced to provide hormone therapies and surgical procedures that are required to change the physical characteristics associated with sex changes.
[...]
In 1993, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer co-sponsored the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA); it was signed by President Bill Clinton. This was a major victory for religious liberty. But now Pelosi and Schumer regret their vote, even to the point of supporting the Equality Act, knowing full well that it exempts itself from RFRA! This is perverse. There could be no more serious undercutting of religious liberty than what they are proposing.
It would mean that Catholics, evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, Mormons, Muslims and many other religious communities could not raise religious liberty objections to any of the aforementioned rights of transgender women. In effect, religious entities would be secularized.
The House has passed the landmark Equality Act, taking LGBTQ+ Americans one step closer to winning legal protection from discrimination. The Equality Act amends the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in addition to race, religion, sex and national origin. The key civil rights bill passed in a vote of 224 to 216, with three Republicans breaking with their party to joining all Democrats in supporting the legislation. But the bill faces an uncertain future in the evenly divided Senate, where Democrats will need 60 votes to break a filibuster on the legislation.
“Without the Equality Act, this nation will never live up to its principles of freedom and equality,” Democratic representative Marie Newman of Illinois, who has a trans daughter, said on the House floor on Wednesday.
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Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people often encounter prejudice in housing, credit, jury service and public spaces, as only 22 states and the District of Columbia prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
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State legislatures regularly advance laws that limit local LGBTQ+ protections. Since the start of the year, a dozen states have introduced or passed laws to bar trans girls from participating in girls’ sports leagues.
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An estimated 83% of Americans favor laws that would protect LGBTQ+ people against discrimination in jobs, public accommodation and housing, including 68% of Republicans, according to a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute.
Franklin Graham, Christian Evangelist
Have you heard of the Equality Act? The name might sound good, but it’s deceiving. It has nothing to do with equality....
Posted by Franklin Graham on Monday, 22 February 2021
But even before the Repugnican allies of the evangelical Christian bigots have had a chance to kill the bill, several prominent professional bigots gave already waded in with their fulminations.
Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League, whom readers may remember for his spirited defence of the child-abusing nuns of Tuam, Ireland, and his declaration that homosexuals were to blame for Catholic priests raping children, said:
It would mean that Catholics, evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, Mormons, Muslims and many other religious communities could not raise religious liberty objections to any of the aforementioned rights of transgender women. In effect, religious entities would be secularized.In other words, it will mean religious bigots can no longer hide behind religious liberty as their excuse for bullying and victimisation of minorities and those with whom they disagree, seeing their right to deny rights to others as the greater right. A secular society exercising a degree of control over the more antisocial activities of religious bigots! Whatever next? They'll be banning witch-burnings soon!
Evangelist Franklin Graham declared on Facebook and in Christianity Today:
The Equality Act would destroy women’s and girls’ sports in this country as we know it. It would allow biological males who choose to identify as females to compete for titles, scholarships, and recognition at all age levels.
The Equality Act would erase women’s privacy—in locker rooms, dressing rooms, homeless shelters, restrooms, and more.
God made us male and female, and that’s it. With some 6,000 years of human history, it has only been in the last few years that people have come up with all of these additional designations for gender identity.
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Christians will be persecuted for their sincerely held beliefs as never before. The clear teachings of the Bible on the sins of homosexuality and abortion will no doubt be considered 'hate speech.' It will be a nightmare from which this nation may never recover.
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| Tony Perkins, President, FRC |
FRC urges US House of Representatives to reject the far-Left Equality Act
The Equality Act is a grave and treasonous threat to our nation's core values contained in our First Amendment. The fact that no Republicans have co-sponsored it, even those who co-sponsored in the previous Congress, underscores the Democrats' lurch to the Left. This is a radical bill that uses the government to control, through coercion, how every American thinks, speaks, and acts on issues of human sexuality. It may be named the Equality Act, but as the details make quite clear, the only equal thing about it is how much damage it does to many facets of American life.
It is an attack on parental rights and women's sports, but to the millions of people of faith in this country, it is an egregious attack on the freedom to believe and live according to those beliefs. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act will be committed to the 'memory hole,' and we will then experience a devastating loss of religious freedom in America, and that will have consequences for all Americans.
Activists in high-office, whom President Biden is working to appoint, could use the Act to punish faith-based organizations of any type—places of worship, schools, small businesses, adoption agencies, pregnancy centers, and other non-profit charities—that decline to surrender their beliefs on the family, sexuality, and even abortion.
The Equality Act is a Trojan horse for radical Leftists, whose goal is to invade every square inch of America, even the homes of those who hold different beliefs, with the force of law. It will effectively cancel people of faith from civil society. We urge every Member of Congress to oppose the Equality Act.
This bill is rotten to its core, and its ideas cannot be salvaged by dressing them up into the 'Fairness for All' proposal – which contains almost all the same harmful provisions as the Equality Act, only with less extreme language and measures. No Republican can claim to protect faith, family, and freedom and also support the so-called 'Fairness for All' bill.
Tony Perkins
President, Family Research Council
President, Family Research Council
Tony Perkins, President of the right-wing Christian Family Research Council was positively apoplectic, writing:
The Equality Act is a Trojan horse for radical Leftists, whose goal is to invade every square inch of America, even the homes of those who hold different beliefs, with the force of law. It will effectively cancel people of faith from civil society. We urge every Member of Congress to oppose the Equality Act.I wonder if these paranoid fruitloops ever stop to wonder whether labelling every piece of progressive legislation as 'radical Leftist' encourages people to wonder if radical leftism might not be such a bad thing after all, if you want a decent, caring and inclusive society where people can live their lives without the fear of bullying and discrimination by religious bigots such as Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham, Bill Donohue and our fourth fruitloop, pro-discrimination bigot, Republican Representative from Georgia, Marjorie "Mad Marge" Taylor Greene.
Before the vote, Rep Greene posted an anti-transgender sign outside her office, bang opposite the office of Illinois Rep Marie Newman – who has a transgender daughter. Ironically, this infantile stunt might have strengthened the resolve of those few Repugnicans prepared to go against their party colleagues and vote with the Democrats.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Repubican, Georgia
QAnon conspiracist and pro-discrimination
QAnon conspiracist and pro-discrimination
According to this report, before being elected to Congress, Greene also called for the execution of prominent Democrat Party politicians. She has also pushed conspiracy theories concerning 9/11, Parkland, Sandy Hook, the Las Vegas shooting, the murder of Democrat staffer, Seth Rich and others.
Every person should be treated with dignity and respect, and this bill represents a critical step toward ensuring that America lives up to our foundational values of equality and freedom for all.
Christian bigots becoming hysterical about other people having legal protection against their persecution of them, illustrate better than most things two truisms of fundamentalism:
President Joe Biden
- Religion provides them with the excuses they need for their hatred of minorities and anyone who doesn't agree with them, so they can present it as some sort of higher morality.
- What they fear most is the loss of their assumed right to special privileges in society, including the right to legislate to control the behaviour of others. They see other people gaining the same rights as they have as a loss of this privilege and a challenge to their entitlement to it.
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