There was a time when civil rights meant supporting nondiscrimination laws. But an increasingly aggressive progressive movement, led by advocates of abortion and sexual deconstructionism, have quickly shifted to opposing nondiscrimination laws.
Oh, they’ll claim the opposite. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced its opposition to “religious liberty” laws (scare-quoted, of course) and declared that “protections ensuring nondiscrimination, as embodied in the Constitution, laws, and policies, are of preeminent importance.”
LGBT and abortion proponents won’t tell you, however, that the conscience laws they oppose are themselves nondiscrimination laws.
Mississippi’s law declares “[t]he state government shall not take any discriminatory action against” organizations and people because they believe (based on religion or not) that “[m]arriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman.”
That’s literally a nondiscrimination law. It establishes a class protected from discrimination, namely those who believe marriage is between a man and a woman.
Mississippi’s law is far from unique in using nondiscrimination language. Shortly after the Supreme Court imposed abortion nationwide in Roe v. Wade, the federal government and nearly all states enacted a slew of explicit nondiscrimination laws protecting pro-life doctors and hospitals as a class.
Congress quickly declared that no entity receiving certain health funding “may discriminate in the employment, promotion, or termination” or “in the extension of staff or other privileges” of health care personnel because they will not perform or assist abortions. This nondiscrimination language is parallel to the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s ban on employment discrimination.
Likewise, for 43 years the blue state of Massachusetts has insisted that “[c]onscientious objection to abortion shall not be grounds for dismissal, suspension, demotion, failure to promote, [or] discrimination in hiring.”
These healthcare nondiscrimination laws don’t just protect physicians, they protect patient choice. Many pregnant women want to go to a physician who unconditionally treats children in the womb as patients, not as potential targets. And many patients want to go to a hospital that shares their faith values. No patient could choose either if all were forced to violate the Hippocratic Oath and their religious beliefs about human life.
Similarly, Mississippi’s nondiscrimination law ensures that patients who seek mental health counseling, perhaps to assist their marriage, will be able to choose a counselor who agrees with them about what marriage is, and fundamentally what it means to have health as wives, husbands, mothers and fathers, both emotionally and spiritually. The LGBT movement wants to force those patients to choose the counselors they agree with on marriage by banning all counselors who disagree.
Faced with this pro-choice quality of conscience laws, The Atlantic recently seemed to concede that conscience violations are anti-choice, but asked nonetheless “whether the alleged advantages of choices in the healthcare market outweigh the potential harms of discrimination.” Even that formulation begs the progressive question, however, since conscience laws also directly block the harms of discrimination perpetrated against protected classes.
Until now progressives have been glad to multiply the categories of protected classes far beyond those five shielded from discrimination in Title VII. The District of Columbia, for example, lists about two dozen protected classes within all its sub-definitions.
But LGBT and abortion agitators can’t stomach allowing pro-life health practice to stay in those lists, or including man-woman marriage beliefs. They attack, rather than respect, pro-life and man-woman marriage nondiscrimination laws.
The USCCR, with no sense of irony, calls for repeal of Mississippi’s nondiscrimination law in the name of respecting nondiscrimination laws. And the ACLU is waging a national campaign, unsuccessful as of yet, asking courts to order religious hospitals and their staff to perform abortions. This blatantly contradicts federal and state nondiscrimination laws. Their most recent case in Michigan was dismissed after Alliance Defending Freedom intervened, but the drumbeat continues.
Nondiscrimination laws protecting pro-life and man-woman marriage believers are laws, too. They were enacted by the state and federal governments. They are common throughout American law and are reinforced by First Amendment protections.
Yet the LGBT and abortion movements reject anyone who disagrees with their agenda. They have hijacked the nondiscrimination concept while urging elimination of pro-life and marriage nondiscrimination laws and protected classes. The Left’s alleged reverence for nondiscrimination laws is what ought to receive journalistic scare quotes.
Matt Bowman is senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
