Why Should Americans Be Concerned about the Equality Act?

             The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns a bill making its way through Congress. The U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 5, a bill known as the Equality Act. This bill if made into law will weaken civil rights laws by equating biological sex with sexual orientation and gender identity, according to Rep. Robert Good (Virginia). 

This legislation at its core would take civil rights laws designed to protect classes of people based upon immutable and objective characteristics and would instead base it upon subject ideas about gender and political viewpoints about sexual orientation.

For example, if a biological boy or man identifies himself as a girl or woman, he would be considered just as female under the Equality Act – which opens the doors to allowing biological men to compete with girls and women in sports or use female restrooms across the country.

By equating the immutable with the subjective, those in power seek a moral mandate to silence any dissenting viewpoint.

The Equality Act will be extremely detrimental to the rights of women and girls in sports, churches and synagogues, private schools, and other faith-based organizations.

            The Equality Act is the latest move by Leftists to silence dissent. The movement started ten or twenty years ago with “politically-correct speech” and has only gotten worse. Good wrote that the legislation “reveals how the left has no tolerance in the public square for dissenting viewpoints.” It does not matter to Leftists that the great majority of Americans believe in traditional values, the same values that have kept America strong for more than 200 years. Good argued that it is time for Americans to “stop pretending” that opposition to traditional American values comes from moderates.

The Equality Act is a deliberate attempt to force people of faith to embrace behaviors that conflict with their sincerely held religious beliefs, which will limit their freedom to love their neighbors.

The Equality Act would make wholesale and damaging changes to our nation’s civil rights laws, with little to no debate in Congress regarding how this legislation will affect the daily lives of Americans and the institutions they hold dear.

While the Equality Act purports to be an “inclusive” piece of legislation, it actually excludes those with different viewpoints. It would ultimately put civil rights law at odds with long-standing religious beliefs pertaining to sex, sexuality, and other moral issues.

This means that faith-based nonprofits – such as a Christian homeless shelter for battered women, an adoption or foster care agency, or another religiously affiliated provider of social services – could not serve in good conscience or operate consistently with their principles without the risk of suffering consequences under federal law.

            Good concludes his article by stating that making the Equality Act federal law will put all Americans in line to being persecuted and tried in federal court. Conservative Americans should be concerned about the Equality Act and should be contacting their representatives in Washington, D.C., and making their thoughts and feelings known.