Homosexuals Should Not be a Protected Class
The primary justification for civil rights laws is that no one should be discriminated against for innate characteristics, like race, that he did not choose and has no control over. The implication of placing groups like homosexuals under the protection of federal civil rights law is that homosexuality is an innate condition that homosexuals have no control over.
But homosexuality is not an innate condition. We know, from studies of identical twins who share identical DNA, that homosexuality is not genetic. When one identical twin is gay, the other twin, who shares his genetic instructions, is overwhelmingly likely to be straight. The chances of the identical twin of a gay person also being gay are elevated over the general population (which is about 1% to 3%), but so little elevated that it is easily attributable solely to environmental factors (“nurture”), and essentially falsifies a genetic (“nature”) hypothesis.
But same-sex attraction often manifests in early childhood, and therefore, it is argued, it is wrong to prevent or discourage such persons from acting on their inclinations. But no functional government can ever accede to the notion that people must not be discouraged from acting on their inclinations, however early in life such inclinations have manifested. A dishonest person may have found, early in life, that it is easier to get what you want if you lie, but every functioning society has laws against fraud, misrepresentation, perjury, and lying in many different contexts. A strongly acquisitive person can experience a desire to steal starting in early childhood, but any functioning society punishes theft. A boy who experienced an overpowering sex drive starting early in life may want to skip the process of obtaining a woman’s consent to sexual activity, but every functioning society has laws against rape. A man may, from early in life, have been sexually attracted to children, but every functioning society puts strong sanctions in the way of anyone who would act on that temptation.
There’s a long list of things that people are, starting early in life, persistently tempted to do, but which society nevertheless discourages them from doing. Not long ago, same-sex sexual activity was on that long list, and it still is in many places. It has been taken off the list in most Western countries as the result of a decades-long propaganda effort, but it should not have been.
It is easy enough to make an entirely non-religious, public health-based case against normalizing same-sex sexual relations. According to the CDC, of the almost 39,000 Americans who contracted the HIV virus in 2017, the overwhelming majority (62.5%) were men who have sex with other men. Despite 35 years of education directed largely at the gay community, homosexual men continue to engage in risky behavior. The risk of transmission of the HIV virus is at least thirteen times greater with anal intercourse than with vaginal. Other risks include the transmission of Human Papilloma Virus (which elevates the risk of anal cancer, and can cause anal warts, which double the risk of anal cancer), hepatitis A, B, and C, E. Coli infections, and urinary tract infections ranging from cystitis to pyelonephritis. One need not be at all religious to recognize that sodomy is a threat to public health and safety, and should not be encouraged.
But the FFAA is not about striking down sodomy laws (done by the Supreme Court in 2003) or about mandating that the states provide for same-sex marriage (done by the Supreme Court in 2015). The FFAA is about giving homosexuals special legal protections that most other groups do not have. It is about legally privileging homosexuals. The message strongly communicated by adding homosexuals to the list of protected categories in federal civil rights law is that homosexuality is blameless, wholesome, and good. It is not merely to be tolerated; it is to be encouraged and celebrated. Those who oppose it should be crushed using all the legal machinery the U.S. Government, with its limitless resources, can bring to bear.
But God’s view of homosexual conduct hasn’t changed. According to Scripture, it is an abomination. Adventists should not be lobbying for legislation that is based upon the notion that homosexual conduct is blameless, wholesome, and deserving of legal protection. Not even as part of an attempt at political compromise with those who would persecute Christians.
Gays Do Not Need Civil Rights Protection
Twenty-one states already have civil rights protection for sexual orientation-gender identity, including most of the larger states, such as California, New York, and Illinois, where the LGBT population tends to be concentrated. Federal civil rights law would be legally redundant for most gay and transgendered people.
But even in more conservative states without statewide SOGI laws, gays and transgendered persons do not face discrimination in the large cities of those states, where the gay-transgendered population is clustered. To the contrary, gays virtually run cities like Houston, Dallas, Austin, New Orleans, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa etc. In 2014, as a gender-identity bathroom bill was being debated in Houston, the city’s lesbian mayor, Annise Parker, subpoenad the sermon notes of pastors who preached on SOGI-related issues.
Far from being a persecuted and oppressed minority, Gays and lesbians are some of the most economically privileged people in our society. Gay affluence is not myth, but a reality. Gays tend to work in high paying professions. A recent study by two Vanderbilt economists found that:
Self‐identified lesbians earn significantly more than comparable heterosexual women. These data also show . . . that self‐identified gay men also earn significantly more than comparable heterosexual men, a difference on the order of 10% of annual earnings.
Not only do they make more money, gays and lesbians also have more disposable income, because they usually do not have children or spouses to support. Far from discriminating against them, merchants are lined up to market to them; everyone wants their business, because everyone knows they have money to spend.
The notion that gays are a persecuted group is risible nonsense. The only “discrimination” they face is manufactured for political purposes, such as when gay activists go looking for religious bakers, photographers, and florists to harass and destroy.
No One Needs Civil Rights Protection
The federal government telling people who they must associate with—who they must hire, sell to, do business with, etc.—is a heavy-handed intrusion into civil society unusual in American history. It was deemed necessary to counteract a unique evil in America life—a peculiar institution of racial apartheid that followed on the heels of the peculiar institution of race-based slavery which, toward its end, was often supported by racist arguments, such as that blacks were inherently inferior and needed to be under the paternalistic control of whites.
Blacks have faced unique obstacles; their story was not, and is not, paralleled by any other group in our society. But even they do not need formal Civil Rights protection anymore. Blacks are now successful in all walks of life, not just sports and entertainment, and (in case you missed it) we recently had a black president of the United States for eight years. Jim Crow is long gone, and there is no significant demographic or group that seeks to re-impose it.
Unfortunately, the civil rights model that was used to break up southern segregation half a century ago has waxed stronger and stronger, and been applied to more and more groups in ever more contexts. What we now have, explains Christopher Caldwell in his new book, “The Age of Entitlement,” is a civil rights-based system that is parallel to, and often in conflict with, the constitutional system the founders established. Notwithstanding that blacks were the only group that really needed civil rights vindication, the civil rights model has spread throughout our society like kudzu.
There is no longer any need for federal bureaucrats to hover over our society, threatening to force us to play nice with each other. It is time to return to the default condition of freedom from governmental coercion and compulsion. Rather than add more categories to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, thereby entrusting our happiness to the referees of a federal bureaucracy that daily grows more corrupt, high-handed, and oppressive, we should repeal that law and return to the freedom our founders bequeathed us.
The Fairness for All Gambit Will Fail
The FFAA will not pass, because it does not have a constituency. The real purpose of the “Equality Act” is not to provide gays with redundant legal protection that very few could even subjectively claim to need, but to destroy conservative Christianity in the United States, to crush biblical religion. If you remove that element from the Equality Act legislation, as the FFAA does, homosexual activists have no interest in it, and will not support it. And they are happy to tell you that:
“For LGBTQ people living at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, this bill [the FFA] is a double whammy of dangerous rollbacks and discriminatory carve-outs. This bill is both wrong and harmful, and we strongly oppose it,” said Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay activist group, in a statement issued on December 6, 2019, the day the Fairness for All Act was rolled out:
“The ‘Fairness for All’ Act is anything but fair, and it certainly does not serve all of us. It is an affront to existing civil rights protections that protect people on the basis of race, sex, and religion and creates new, substandard protections for LGBTQ people with massive loopholes and carve-outs . . . This legislation is deeply dangerous for many reasons . . .”
Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Interfaith Alliance, said the Fairness for All Act would create a “right to discriminate” rather than reducing existing harms. “Religious exemptions in commerce, family definition, medical care or other legal and legally defined benefits of citizenship are, by any other name, a repudiation of the very principles of equality that are foundational to the United States.”
In addition to the Human Rights Campaign, the FFAA is opposed by Lambda Legal, GLAAD, PFLAG National, and the Transgender Law Center.
Likewise, many conservative Christians do not support the FFAA. The measure is opposed by several conservative and Christian groups, including the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the American College of Pediatricians, Concerned Women for America, the Christian Medical Association, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. and the Heritage Foundation. They understand that it is bad for America, and a further step in marginalizing the Christian worldview.
Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission described the measure as “a wrong turn” and “counterproductive”:
“Placing sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in this kind of legislation would have harmful, unintended consequences and make the situation worse in this country, both in terms of religious freedom and in terms of finding ways for Americans who disagree to work together for the common good.”
The Adventist religious liberty savants have miscalculated, for two reasons.
First, they do not understand the power of social consensus about ethics and morals. In theory, people who do not believe the same thing should be able to live in peace and mutual toleration. Gays should be able to live as they wish, according to their beliefs, while leaving Christians to live as they wish, according to their beliefs, and vice versa. It is a beautiful theory, and the SDA religious liberty establishment is betting on it, they have pushed all their chips to the middle of the table, based upon this theory. But it is not reality.
In reality, societies develop a shared consensus about right and wrong, which, after the consensus is cemented, is imposed on everyone. Society can have only one consensus about right and wrong at any one time. A few decades back, and for centuries before that, the consensus was that homosexual conduct was wrong. That consensus was imposed on everyone, through social disapproval and discrimination, but also through criminal statutes against sodomy.
The new consensus is that homosexuality is right, and those who disapprove of it are bigoted and hateful, and need to be legally disempowered and marginalized, just as open racists were disempowered and marginalized half a century ago. The new consensus is supported by the secular Left and the religious Left, including mainline Protestantism; it is unquestioned dogma throughout the educational system, and thus sacred writ to those under 30.
The other thing the SDA religious liberty establishment never understood, and seems not to understand even yet, is the end goal of the homosexual lobby. I think our religious liberty establishment took at face value homosexual pleas for “live-and-let-live” toleration. But the gay mob was never interested in mere toleration, only in gathering enough power to destroy anyone who dares voice disapproval of their “lifestyle.” They have long since moved on from a defensive posture to an offensive one, and, having prevailed in secular society and in the mainline Protestant denominations—(they’ve run the Roman Catholic Church for a millennium)—their target is now the small group of conservative Protestants who still take literally the Bible’s passages condemning homosexual sex.
This was highlighted in the case of Dr. Eric Walsh, the Seventh-day Adventist director of the City of Pasadena’s Department of Public Health. When gay activists discovered that Walsh had preached sermons criticizing homosexuality, not only did they mob the Pasadena city council and get Walsh fired, they reached all the way to Georgia and got him fired from a rural public health district that had hired him after Pasadena fired him. In effect, the gay mob permanently prevented Walsh from pursuing his chosen profession, for which he had trained and which he loved.
The ugly nature of the gay mob was also highlighted a few years ago when it descended on Indianapolis, as the Indiana legislature was about to pass a state version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. On that incident, Tucker Carlson commented of the gay mob:
“And I have to say, all the talk of tolerance that a lot of us sort of took at face value in the '90s and even last decade: 'why can't we all just get along, you accept me, and I'll accept you.' They didn't mean it at all. These are absolutists, these are jihadis, these are people who want to make you obey, that don't brook any opposition to their worldview at all--they will crush you.”
Scripture has given us, in Genesis 19 and Judges 19, a clear and sobering picture of what ensues when homosexuals gain social acceptance and ascendancy. This is a satanic evil. But we didn’t take that Scripture seriously, and we still do not.
Sadly, Seventh-day Adventists sat out the culture wars in which that new consensus was formed. We did worse than sit them out, we actively rooted against evangelicals and other conservative Christians, because we were certain that those folks were about to impose a Sunday law on us. Now, we are dealing with a new pagan sexual consensus, and it is too late to snatch a measure of religious freedom from the jaws of neo-pagan persecution. The Equality Act will pass the next time Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress. Its backers will have no need to compromise with conservative Christians who have been discredited, marginalized and defeated throughout the culture.