Action Alert: Religious Liberty is Now on the Line!
Tomorrow afternoon (January 23), a House Subcommittee will hear and vote on bills designed to take away our most fundamental freedoms by elevating the fluid concepts of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” (SOGI) to protected classes in every part of our state law. Every place these measures are passed, people of deep faith are always the ones being taken to court, losing their jobs, their businesses, their reputations, and their livelihoods.
CLICK HERE now to urge your Delegate to Vote NO on House Bills 3, 21, 23, 217, 1049, 1050, and 1663!
HB 3 (D-McQuinn) and HB 217 (D-Convris-Fowler) incorporate SOGI into VA’s housing laws, which will negatively impact religious colleges, churches, charities, and other institutions by forcing them to choose between violating their faith tenets or facing expensive lawsuits by “LGBTQ” activists. (Example: “Transgender files complaint against shelter for abused women”)
HB 23 (D-Lindsey), in addition to adding SOGI to housing laws, would add SOGI to state employment. This will most certainly compel all state employees to speak words and messages they fundamentally disbelieve (and which are empirically untrue), such as “preferred gender” pronouns, or be fired if they don’t comply (It’s already happening: See The Firing of Peter Vlaming). It will also require biological men who self-identify as women to be given access to women’s bathrooms and changing rooms.
HB 21 (D-Lindsey) would make decisions on account of SOGI an unlawful discriminatory practice under the Virginia Human Rights Act, essentially blanketing the entire law with this concept. It also creates a cause of action for small employers for letting go of an employee for reasons related to SOGI. (Just like Thomas Rost, the owner of Harris Funeral Homes, whose case awaits a Supreme Court decision.)
HB 1050 (D-Levine) and HB 1663 (D-Sickles) go even further by adding SOGI to “public accommodations”, private employment, housing, credit, and also create causes of action for lawsuits. HB 1049 (D-Levine) does all that AND MORE, adding SOGI to public contracting, apprenticeship programs, banking, and insurance. The magnitude of the impact of these bills on everyone in society – but especially devoted Christians (as we’ve seen increasingly in other states) – is difficult to put into words. Needless to say, it’s incredibly destructive and targets people of faith and conscience.
These bills would weaponize the state government with the power to punish those whose viewpoint runs contrary to government’s standards of marriage and human sexuality. Many cases that come to mind, but none more well known by now than that of Jack Phillips, a cake baker from Colorado who’s been the target of anti-discrimination laws because he refused to bake a cake for a homosexual couple who were getting married. Incidentally, Jack had actually prepared cakes for the couple on a number of occasions and never denied service until they asked him to bake a wedding cake. (Read our blog: “It’s Not About Wedding Cakes”)
While non-discrimination laws based on one’s sexual orientation or gender identity may sound tolerant, the outcome is that they tend to result in intolerant applications that punish people of faith who have sincerely-held religious views on marriage and sexuality.
Proponents of these laws cannot offer one piece of evidence that discrimination is taking place. In state government, according to the Virginia Department of Resource Management, there have been no cases of actual discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity beginning in 2009, when they began collecting data, through 2019. The only reason to introduce these bills is to empower the government to strong-arm people into abandoning their beliefs about marriage and sexuality.
These bills are all the more reason why it’s vital that you contact your Delegates and tell them that you oppose policies that adopt dubious categories into our anti-discrimination policies that will only target people of conscience.
CLICK HERE to urge your Delegate to Oppose these dangerous policies that threaten our liberties!
