Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Women beware! The party that claims to be all about women’s rights has introduced a bill known as “The Equality Act” which will make “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” protected classes under federal rights law. While it might sound good on paper, enforcement of this law will actually rob women and many other Americans of the liberties they hold dear.
Breitbart’s Dr. Susan Berry is reporting on the new law, known as H.R. 5/S. 788 which will “prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and for other purposes.” By doing so, it will insure that gender ideology – along with its transgender bathrooms, forced preferred pronoun use, and biological men playing women’s sports – becomes enshrined in federal law.
“Prohibiting discrimination and promoting equality sound virtuous, but many serious opponents — including a coalition of conservatives, feminists, lesbians, and Christians — are warning Americans the Equality Act is dangerous legislation that will do anything but create equality. In fact, the measure would likely force American women throughout the country to relinquish their rights to privacy, safety, and the ability to compete in sports ‘equally’,” writes Dr. Berry.
The Heritage Foundation’s Monica Burke agrees, warning that the Equality Act would ultimately lead to the “erasure of women” by dismantling sex-specific facilities, sports, and other female-only spaces. History has proven that opening up sex-specific facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms to members of the opposite sex serves only to enable sexual assault.
In addition, this new law will also rob women of the ability to compete fairly in sports because biological males who identify as women will be permitted on their teams and use their natural physical advantages to outpace them.
Burke cites the case of two biological males who recently competed as women and took the top prizes in a Connecticut State Track Championship last June, thus forcing a female runner to lose the race – and a shot at coveted athletic scholarships.
“The Equality Act would defeat the entire purpose of Title IX, which was meant to ensure that women would have the same opportunities as men, including in sports, and would leave women vulnerable to sexual assault,” Burke writes.
Emily Zinos, an advocate for women and children and member of Hands Across the Aisle — a group of women from across the political spectrum who have partnered to challenge the notion that gender is the same as sex — is using social media to warn women that the Equality Act is a “direct attack on women and girls” and chides the 161 corporations who have come out in support of the bill.
She writes: “In the era of #MeToo, it’s hard to understand why these companies are willing to endanger women and girls by acting so deliberately to undermine the nation’s indecent exposure and voyeurism restrictions, in what are supposed to be single-sex accommodations. Is it any wonder that many of them have recently faced significant sexual harassment allegations, or had large bias or sexual harassment claims brought against them?”
As threatening as this bill is to women’s health and safety, they aren’t the only people who will suffer if this atrocity manages to become law.
As Burke points out, it will also force employers and workers to conform to new sexual norms or lose their businesses and jobs.
Hospitals and insurers would be forced to provide – and pay for – gender change therapies even when they are in violation of the providers moral or medical objections.
“This politicization of medicine would ultimately harm families by normalizing hormonal and surgical interventions for gender-dysphoric children, as well as ideological ‘education’ in schools and other public venues,” she warns.
It will also hurt charities, volunteers, and the populations they serve by forcing the shut-down of adoption and foster care agencies across the country who conform to the scientifically-supported belief that children do best in a home with a mother and a father.
The U.S. Bishops have issued a letter to both the House and the Senate expressing their concerns about this law, which they say would have wide-reaching impacts on health care, women and girls’ legal protections, charitable services to needful populations, schools, personal privacy, athletics, free speech, religious liberties, and potentially parental rights.
“This proposed legislation does not accomplish what its supporters assert,” they write, “but rather creates new difficulties and will hurt more people than its designers want to help,”
Naming this unjust bill “The Equality Act” is a joke. The only equality it insures is that of a small minority of people while guaranteeing inequality to everyone else. We can – and must – do better than this!
Contact your representatives today and urge them not to support this unjust bill!
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