Time for us to rethink anti-discrimination laws that gut freedom of association and contract.
THE STREAM
John Zmirak May 14, 2019
As the worthy grass roots group Mass Resistance writes:
There is a terrible bill working its way through Congress right now. It’s called the “Equality Act” (HR 5), and it’s anything but about equality. It’s about special rights for the Destructive LGBT Agenda!
Authored by openly homosexual Congressman David Cicilline (D-Rhode Island), this legislation aims to “expand” the Civil Rights Act and its protections to include homosexuals, transgenders, and individuals who identify with other paraphilias. This bill will normalize perverse, destructive behaviors while harming children.
This legislation is nothing more than a Trojan Horse to stamp out our God-Given rights, enshrined in the United States Constitution. It’s an attack on life, the family, and our society as a whole.
If this bill passes and gets signed into law, these are some of the terrible outcomes that will follow:
- This bill will undermine the Civil Rights Movement which black Americans fought for.
- Churches will get sued or lose their tax-exemption status if they do not accommodate LGBT behaviors.
- Children would be forced to learn about destructive LGBT behaviors in public schools.
- Parents who oppose this curriculum could be charged with illegal discrimination.
- Private colleges would lose funding, grants, and scholarships.
- Public accommodations and small businesses would be forced to allow men into women’s bathrooms and vice versa.
- Business owners would be forced to violate their freedom of conscience.
- Hospitals and clinics will be forced to offer experimental and harmful transgender treatments.
- Foster and adoption agencies with natural values will be forced to close.
A Lawless Law
This bill would codify the lawless behavior of the Obama administration. It directed key agencies to pretend that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 included “sexual orientation and identity.” You know, between the lines, the way the Constitution protects abortion. Which would have been strange in 1964, when acts of sodomy were illegal in 49 states.
Every American concerned for religious freedom, should contact his member of Congress. Because the Equality Act is winning. All the money, power, and influence of the LGBT lobby is behind this outrageous bill. Expect Hollywood stars to do little Instagram cameos pushing it. Local Chambers of Commerce will speak out for it. “Moderate” Republicans will vote for it if they can. The Democrats seem likely to support it unanimously. We must hope (and loudly demand) that the Republican Senate stymies or President Trump vetoes this bill.
All the principalities and powers will cooperate in giving this cudgel to Leviathan. And to litigious thugs like Rep. Brian Sims. Guys who hike their testosterone count by bullying women and kids. Ask Jack Phillips and other victims of Gay Sharia how it feels. You know, to have the cash-gorged homosexual lobbyists and the government cooperatively hounding you. That will be the fate of every faithful Christian if this unjust bill becomes law.
The Ticking Time Bomb in the Civil Rights Act
We’ve finally hit the fundamental problem with anti-discrimination law. This time bomb has been ticking since 1964. That’s when Barry Goldwater outraged people by opposing the Civil Rights Act. He said that by targeting private businesses, and not just the government, it violated core principles of liberty — the freedoms of contract and association. That was bad politics. But good Constitutional thinking.
Goldwater was correct that the Civil Rights Act threatened such freedoms. But Americans knew something else. That the government itself had for 100 years flouted freedom already in the opposite direction. All across the South (but not just the South) the state imposed segregation imposed by force, by law. For two centuries before that, federally enforced slavery had violated human freedom much more profoundly. Blood was still fresh on Southern streets from sheriffs beating peaceful Civil Rights demonstrators. From Klansmen bombing black churches. So nobody was going to fight for something as abstract-sounding as “freedom of contract” or “freedom of association” then.
Nobody but Barry Goldwater. And genuine segregationists, who didn’t really care about those principles. In fact, they made the Civil Rights Act genuinely troublesome, from a liberty point of view. They added sex discrimination to race, in the hope of killing the bill. But that didn’t work. They managed instead to outlaw a perfectly rational form of discrimination between the profoundly different male and female of our species. How? By equating decisions based on real sex differences with something as stupid and arbitrary as bigotry against skin color.
At a stroke of President Johnson’s pen went the “family wage” which most churches (and first-wave feminists) had favored. Now it was illegal. Christian or just civic-minded employers who’d once given higher salaries to fathers of families than single men or women? They could no longer do so. It didn’t take long for economics (along with feminist ideology) to drive most women into the workforce. Even those with tiny children. Now the left pushes pre-K, government daycare, and every other measure to get Leviathan’s hands on our kids as soon as possible.
Now All “Discrimination” Seems Evil and Is Illegal
Today it’s time to grab the porcupine and admit it. The Civil Rights Act overreached. Policies and court decisions enacted in its wake followed its logic to crackpot extremes. Soon the intent to discriminate no longer mattered. What if an innocent or rational policy had a “disparate impact” on different groups? It might prove illegal. So goodbye to IQ or vocational tests which routinely showed higher scores on the part of some groups. You could no longer use them in hiring. Instead, as Charles Murray has pointed out, employers relied on the SATs. Now people hire based on which pricey (increasingly radical) college potential hires attended.
Even physical standards for firefighters and Marines. We must dumb them down and hobble them, lest women lose opportunities. Now we have to fight to keep the military, and even our prisons, from paying for dangerous, useless, destructive sex-change therapy. And to keep the state from imposing them on our children against their parents’ wishes.
Affirmative action programs, de facto quotas, helped employers and colleges avoid litigation. Soon they included every possible group except straight white males. Those alone are explicitly not a “protected class.” In some states that means an employer could simply say, “I’m firing you because you’re a straight white male.” And that wouldn’t be illegal. But an illegal immigrant who gets an amnesty? He could enjoy affirmative action quota help at the expense of a white male combat veteran.
All-male clubs have been hunted virtually to extinction. All-female colleges only survive because men are not a protected class. Historically black colleges get a pass for much the same reason. We have kept some remnants of free contract and association, but only for “underprivileged” groups.
The Shrinking Religious Exemption
Increasingly, the only meaningful exception from this all-pervasive meddling of bureaucrats, regulators, and litigators, lies in the “religious” exemption. The federal government does not (yet) demand that Baptist churches hire Buddhists as clergy. That Catholic bishops accept female priests or male nuns. That religious schools hire openly gay employees. Note that ordinary Christians like Jack Phillips or the owners of Hobby Lobby don’t enjoy such an exemption. It only applies, very narrowly, to explicit ministries.
The Equality Act aims at shrinking this tiny oasis of freedom still further. We should fight it of course. But the culture at large increasingly accepts sexual perversions as normal. So our battle will be a losing one. Abandoning natural law as the criterion for lawmaking is the royal road to chaos and tyranny. Unless and until we can convince the voting public that same-sex sex and transexual butchery are unnatural and don’t deserve special protection, our churches will end up essentially illegal. Sooner or later.
Time to Start from Scratch
I suggest we consider another approach. Males have become a minority of graduates of college. So maybe they shouldn’t be singled out as a group that’s unprotected. Whites are shrinking to a minority of Americans. So maybe they shouldn’t labeled as the only group it’s fair game to hate or shun. As conservatives and Christians get silenced, doxed, shamed and banned, they deserve the protection of expanded anti-discrimination law.
Of course, that would mean eliminating the last vestiges of free association and contract. Even for “minority” and “victim” groups. I think there’s a better option — however politically difficult it might seem.
If everybody’s a minority, then nobody is. How about we eliminate all affirmative action, period?