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What are SOGI laws?
Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) bills generally elevate LGBT individuals to a protected class under our civil rights laws. By doing so, SOGI laws effectively impose one point of view of sexuality on all other Americans. Not adhering to LGBT orthodoxy becomes wrong and, in many circumstances, unlawful. Americans who believe in biological differences between males and females or who have deeply held religious beliefs about sexuality are treated as the legal equivalent of racist bigots. SOGI laws restrict the ability of Americans to disagree freely.
Who is harmed by SOGI laws?
While many SOGI bills claim the mantle of civil rights and inclusion of all Americans, they create greater inequality and further divide Americans into classes. Women and girls suffer substantially under SOGI laws as they are forced by law to share private spaces, such as bathrooms and dressing rooms, with biological males. They are forced to compete with biological males in sports and for scholarship programs that are established for and reserved for women. Doctors, religious Americans, business owners, charities, and others are harmed by SOGI laws as they are forced to accept a particular sexual ideology and modify their own behavior or risk being in violation of the law.
What is Fairness for All?
Fairness for All (FFA) is a bill, whose authors argue, is a compromise between the Equality Act and the position of many religious leaders. However, FFA contains the same foundational principles as the Equality Act by elevating sexual orientation and gender identity to protected status under our nation’s civil rights laws. In exchange, FFA carves out certain protections for religious Americans but confines those protections within religious institutions, excluding protections for those beliefs from the public square. FFA claims to promote equality and fairness, but it only serves to undermine the ability of Americans to exercise their beliefs freely.
How does Fairness for All harm women and girls in private spaces?
Americans expect to have privacy and safety when in certain spaces such as restrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms, spas, bathing facilities, and many more places. FFA forces women and girls to share these private spaces with biological males who identify as females. FFA supporters claim that women and girls are given the opportunity to use facilities reserved just for females. But the reality is FFA forces women and girls to ask for permission to use another facility, making safety and privacy a burden to be asked for, but doesn’t require permission to be given or that another facility even be available. Women and girls deserve better than to be forced to share private spaces with biological males.
How does Fairness for All harm women and girls in sports and the workplace?
Women and girls have made great strides toward complete equality in sports and the workplace. These advances have been supported by laws which have cleared pathways for women and girls to succeed where there has been historical bias against them. For instance, Title IX opened up opportunities for women and girls in athletics, and several programs administered by agencies such as the Small Business Administration support female entrepreneurs as they launch startups or contract with the government. But under FFA, these programs would be opened up to biological males who would be allowed to compete directly against females distorting the whole purpose of these programs. Even worse, women and girls would be left with no way to challenge this new system. FFA strikes a blow to the equality of women and girls.
How does Fairness for All harm children and other vulnerable Americans?
FFA dooms children in state custody who are struggling with gender dysphoria to a predetermined outcome. Under this bill, nearly all adoption and foster care placement agencies are required to treat children as the gender that child believes they are and affirm the child in their choice of gender. Not only would this requirement lead many children into a medical path of puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgery, but FFA would also prevent agencies from offering mental health care to children who are struggling with fundamental questions about their gender. But it's not just children. FFA also denies funding to any shelter for battered and abused women who refuses to permit a biological male from sleeping or otherwise using the same spaces as the women and girls. Women who have been recently battered, likely by a man, may seek a safe haven only to find a biological male sleeping next to them. FFA institutionalizes trauma and abuse of our children and other Americans who are most vulnerable.
How does Fairness for All harm Americans with religious or closely held beliefs?
FFA places shackles on the hands of medical and mental health providers by requiring them to treat patients in a manner that affirms their gender identity regardless of whether or not that type of treatment is deemed to be harmful for the individual. Doctors and other health care providers would be forced to perform treatments and procedures on patients over the doctor’s or other health care provider’s professional recommendation, conscience, or other objection. Health care providers cannot adhere to their commitment to provide the best possible care to every patient while being forced by the government to perform procedures based upon someone identifying as a particular gender. Similarly, while potentially causing a host of other problems in the workplace, by elevating sexual orientation and gender identity to a protected status under federal law, FFA would force employers to cover medical procedures and other health care procedures which may be controversial at best in their employee health plans. Business owners who employ 15 people or more would lose any semblance of their own closely held or religious beliefs as they would be required to accept any kind of sexual or gender ideology their employees embrace. In fact, while FFA claims to protect religious freedom, it only protects it in the most narrow of circumstances while exposing churches, synagogues, mosques, faith-based schools, and other religious institutions to lawsuits if they fail to offer their public facilities to those who disagree with them on sexual orientation and gender identity. FFA poses a direct threat to Americans who have a personal set of beliefs, particularly those whose beliefs are based on religion.
The Representatives and Senators who support Fairness for All have good intentions. They are trying to find a balance between the onslaught from the left and religious freedom. But they are wrong. Fairness for All is not a compromise - it is a defeat.
Instead, our elected representatives should be defending true freedom for all Americans. Americans deserve to live their lives free from government intrusion. By using the power of the federal government to force Americans to accept a belief system and a sexual ideology that violates their personal or religious beliefs, Fairness for All breaches the trust of Americans, and no member of Congress should support this legislation.