Debunking a Few of the Lies and Misconceptions Surrounding the Passage of the Equality Act
It will now be illegal to discriminate against someone based on who they love or based on their gender.
With the recent passage of the Equality Act by the US House of Representatives, there have been a lot of very worrying claims made about it and the dangers it poses. It is worth having a look at some of these claims and whether or not there is any merit behind them. First, however, let’s look at exactly what the new law does.
The Equality Act: what does it actually do?
What the Equality Act actually does is really quite minor, although it does have far-reaching consequences. For the most part, it simply adds a few words to the 1964 Civil Rights Act:
In numerous places, where discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin and such are banned, the words “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)” are added.
In the listing of places where discrimination is banned, the word “stadium” is removed and replaced by the following: “stadium or other place of or establishment that provides exhibition, entertainment, recreation, exercise, amusement, public gathering, or public display;”
Then the following text is added to specify where discrimination is banned: “any establishment that provides a good, service, or program, including a store, shopping center, online retailer or service provider, salon, bank, gas station, food bank, service or care center, shelter, travel agency, or funeral parlor, or establishment that provides health care, accounting, or legal services; any train service, bus service, car service, taxi service, airline service, station, depot, or other place of or establishment that provides transportation service;”
In Section 208, an establishment “shall be construed to include an individual whose operations affect commerce and who is a provider of a good, service, or program; and shall not be construed to be limited to a physical facility or place.”
That expands the list of places covered by the Civil Rights act by quite a lot and even includes social media.
Much of the rest of the Equality Act is general housekeeping, repeating aforementioned changes to various sections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as a few other later laws. Crucially, the act does define exactly what is meant by the addition of sexual orientation and gender identity. While sexual orientation is simple to understand, the term gender identity deserves a look.
In Section 1101, Subsection A, Part 2: “GENDER IDENTITY. — The term ‘gender identity’ means the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.”
So this seems quite dull and technical. What does it actually mean?
What it boils down to is this: in any situation where it has been illegal to discriminate against someone based on religion or race, it will now be illegal to discriminate against someone based on who they love or based on their gender. The term “gender identity” differentiates this from biological sex.
I recently wrote a highly detailed article discussing the confusing world of sex and gender, which I would encourage you to read HERE. Within that article, we explore intersex conditions that people are born with, which affect roughly 1 in every 50 people — it’s about as common as having red hair in the global population. And we explored the fact that gender is defined as the traits and interests we associate with a particular sex and how many people don’t fit that mold. Thus, there are many people whose sex doesn’t fit easily within the binary mold of male and female as well as a large number whose gender isn’t nearly so clearly male or female. These rules are meant to protect these people from discrimination.
Moreover, the Equality Act expands the list of places where discrimination is prohibited as seen above. This has raised A LOT of concerns with conservatives and, in particular, conservative Christians and those concerns are worth addressing. I have pulled some specific concerns from a few popular publications and have written a companion piece on the topic HERE, detailing the issues raised by Franklin Graham. Below are a few more common concerns about the new Equality Act.
…it renders virtually all biological sex distinctions unlawful, regardless of context.
-David French, The Dispatch: The Equality Act has a Foundational Problem
This is completely untrue and utterly nonsensical, especially when you’ve taken the time to read the act. Discrimination based on sex is still illegal and it is insane to claim that it makes “biological sex distinctions” illegal. What the act does, however, is allow protections for intersex, transsexual and transgendered individuals to be covered by those same anti-discrimination laws.
This law will force people to provide services against their will…
David French writes, “Moreover, while there may not be many trans women who seek to force, for example, a female beautician to wax male genitalia or who wish to spend the night in overnight quarters reserved for women only in a battered women’s shelter, the Equality Act will again create and mandate unnecessary individual injustices.”
Let’s be clear here: this law does force people to provide services against their will. A baker who makes wedding cakes will be required to make wedding cakes for both heterosexual and gay weddings. The 1964 Civil Rights Act already forced racist business owners to provide service to races they don’t like, sexists to provide services to the opposite sex, religious bigots to serve people of any faith. And this law adds sexual orientation and gender-identity to the list of people who deserve the right to be served by businesses, even if the owner personally dislikes the group they come from.
The argument that this law mandates individual injustices, however, is absurd and so are the examples provided. A female beautician may be required to “wax” a male, however, they are certainly allowed to determine what parts of the body they wax. I feel stupid having to point this out, but if a business does not offer waxing of male genitalia as part of its services, it is not required to begin offering that service simply because a person asks for it. On the other hand, if an establishment offers lip waxing for women and a transsexual or transgendered woman enters asking to have their lip waxed, then yes: they are required to serve them.
The argument against men in a battered woman’s shelter is similarly flawed. A battered woman’s shelter is for women who have been abused and are fleeing that abuse, in need of a place to stay. If a person who identifies as a woman has been brutalized and abused by their partner and flees for their own safety, why shouldn’t they be allowed to seek shelter at a woman’s shelter? What the hell else would you ask them to do?
It’s rather cruel to suggest that someone born biologically male who may or may not be intersex, may or may not even be anatomically a male, who identifies as a woman and who has been beaten and abused by her partner to the point where they flee for their life — to suggest that person is a predator putting the other women in the shelter in danger is ridiculous, offensive and blatantly cruel.
Opponents to these laws offering examples of how these protections against discrimination are harmful are forced to turn to flat-out lies and wild exaggerations because in nearly 100% of real-world examples, anyone with compassion could empathize with these people.
The Equality Act forces American churches to violate their own moral codes.
The Equality Act actually makes no mention, whatsoever, of churches or houses of worship. The Act bans discrimination based on orientation and gender identity in “any establishment that provides a good, service, or program” and includes a list of examples, which notably does not include churches or houses of worship. Many conservative commenters have taken the words “provides a service or program” to include churches, but that ignores an important piece of the legislation. The act goes on to define an establishment as “an individual whose operations affect commerce”. Churches are not considered to be institutions of commerce and thus are not subject to the anti-discrimination rules outlined in the Equality Act.
In fact, the only reference made to churches in the civil rights legislation that the Equality Act amends specifically exempts churches and religious institutions (such as Christian colleges) from laws regarding discriminatory hiring. Thus, churches and religious institutions cannot be forced to hire anyone that might violate their own religious code. They remain free to discriminate in who they hire based on any factor for which that church’s faith gives cause.
With that said, there would be a few rare instances where a church or religious institution may face changes as a result of the Equality Act. While religious schools may continue to discriminate in their hiring and student acceptance practices, it may become illegal for them to enforce discrimination in common-use facilities on their campuses, such as locker rooms and bathrooms. This is an unlikely situation to arise in most cases, however, since those schools have a great deal of freedom in choosing who they hire and admit as students to the school.
Another uncommon situation, but one that would arise, would be at a church-operated storefront or business. For-profit businesses can be created and owned by a church, but must be established separately from the church under the tax code. The business is thus not considered to be a part of the church, even though the church owns and operates it. Church-owned businesses include coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants and hotels, publications and media companies. These types of companies would be included under the protection of the Equality Act, despite being church-owned because they are not a part of the church, having been separately established. Thus, it would be illegal for any such for-profit church-owned business to discriminate against anyone they hire or serve based on religion, race, sex, gender identity, etc.
