It was just last week that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was introduced in the Senate, so the Religious Right campaign of screaming their heads off is just getting off the ground.
But Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries gives us a nice preview of the sort of hyperbolic nonsense we can expect to see:
On Aug. 5, the GOP’s Maine kleptocrats, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, joined Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and longtime sponsor Ted Kennedy in reintroducing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which we’ll call the “gay quota bill” for short. ENDA is profoundly dangerous. It turns private sin into a public right and brings the force of government against morality itself. Any such law is a violation of our unalienable rights as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. To put it more simply, a statute that directly contradicts God’s moral law is illegitimate. Laws embody and reflect morality, or they are not laws. They are tyranny. That’s why so-called same-sex “marriage” laws are absurd and treacherous. Forcing citizens to accept a counterfeit as the real thing is an act of despotism.
ENDA adds not only “sexual orientation” but “gender identity” to federal workplace anti-discrimination law. Thus, it takes an ax to the idea that sexual behavior has a natural normalcy or any relation to morality. It falsely equates a changeable condition (sexual desire) with race and ethnicity. Worse, it turns traditional values into a form of bigotry punishable under the law.
First of all, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act already has a short-hand name: ENDA. So we don’t need your suggestion that it should be called the “gay quota bill” because a) that’s false and b) it’s longer than the one we already have.
And secondly, it looks like efforts to pass this legislation are going to run into the same sort of Religious Right lies that plagued the hate crimes legislation, with right-wing activists claiming that it will grant “special rights” to those in the LGBT community.
Of course, that will raise the exact same problems as their efforts to make that claim about hate crimes legislation, considering that there are already a number of federal laws on the books that outlaw employment discrimination based on things like race, religion, gender, and disability:
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Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;
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the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA), which protects men and women who perform substantially equal work in the same establishment from sex-based wage discrimination;
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the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), which protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older;
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Title I and Title V of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), which prohibit employment discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities in the private sector, and in state and local governments;
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Sections 501 and 505 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities who work in the federal government
So, once again the Right will have to explain why gays shouldn’t receive similar protections as say, Christians.
And once again, they’ll fail to do that because they have no reason other than claims that God hates gays and therefore it should be okay to discriminate against them, leading to pieces like Knight’s where the Right is reduced to bellowing that any “statute that directly contradicts God’s moral law is illegitimate.”
