Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., flanked by the full panoply of her liberal congressional cohorts, stood shoulder to shoulder with some of the best known, and well-funded, liberal activists in Washington to introduce the treacly-titled “Equality Act”.
Don’t be fooled by the name: The Equality Act is legislation that would compromise American civil rights and religious liberty as we know it. All reasonable Americans, especially gay Americans who support pluralism and tolerance, should oppose it.
The promise of the so-called “Equality Act” is to enshrine comprehensive protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people into federal law. If passed, it would ensure that Americans could no longer be fired from their jobs, denied housing, or discriminated against without consequence. It’s a noble goal, and one that 69 percent of Americans support, according to a recent poll.
Those numbers reveal the American public supports general “Live and Let Live” principles vis-a-vis the gay community. But dig deeper into the details of the “Equality Act,” and sensible people will find that this is bad legislation that will set back the cause of true equality, perhaps by decades.
Most astonishingly, the “Equality Act” includes next to no exemptions for religious liberty. While no Catholic priest could be compelled by the “Equality Act” to perform a same-sex marriage, for example, Catholic Charities would see any claim to federal funds eliminated as long as they enforced moral policies in line with Church doctrine.
Evangelical campuses would see their nonprofit status jeopardized.
Private businesses whose owners held beliefs that prevented them from participating in same-sex wedding celebrations would be forced to do so or close their doors.
The “Equality Act” would also take the drastic step of amending the Civil Rights Act. For many African-Americans, the Civil Rights Act is more than mere legislation; it holds a sacred place in our nation’s history as a moment in which Congress acted to right the terrible injustice of segregation that persisted more than a century after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
That’s why, in the exhaustive list of 288 statewide and national organizations trotted out by the Human Rights Campaign supporting the “Equality Act,” major African American legacy civil rights groups are absent. The NAACP, for example, which was overjoyed to stand with the Human Rights Campaign in support of civil marriage equality mere years ago, is nowhere to be found on the list of “Equality Act” supporters.
In 1975, when it was first introduced in Congress, this legislation was certainly more needed and relevant. At the time, gay Americans faced prejudice at a far more pervasive rate than they do today. In the 44 years since, without any federal legislative coercion, corporate America has taken the lead, developing organic policies that respect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees. This is the free market at work in all its glory, and it offers a far more promising path than this flawed legislation.
In the run-up to the United States Supreme Court marriage equality decisions of 2013 and 2015, gay advocates such as myself promised those we disagreed with that allowing same-sex couples to marry would have no effect on them, their families, or their faith.
Passage of the “Equality Act” would make liars out of the lot of us. It would put the nonprofit status of religious charities at risk; it would force mom-and-pop businesses to participate in same-sex marriage ceremonies; and it would flout bedrock principles that have served as the foundation of the American experience for centuries.
There is potential for federal legislation that guarantees protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans while yet shielding people of faith and good will from heavy-handed punishment by the government. But the “Equality Act” isn’t it.
Gregory T. Angelo is a communications consultant based in Washington, D.C. and the former President of Log Cabin Republicans.
