04 Jun 2021 Despite HRC Claims, Corporations Don’t Support The Unequal Parts Of The Equality Act

The professional left is lying about support for the Equality Act.

Scott Shepard

I know. I’ll give you a few minutes to fan yourself until the spell passes.

It’s not news that the professional left (by which I mean all the people who get paid to shackle the American people in the chains of modern leftism, by whatever means necessary) do not consider the truth a guiding obligation. Heck, in their daffier academic versions (see, e.g., critical [anything] theory) leftists argue that “truth” is constructed by power, so that absolutely any position or behavior is justified in the effort to shift power from the “wrong” to the “right” people. (Note: if you’re reading this, you are the wrong people, and whatever is done to you is OK, because you stand between them and power, however indirectly.)

So it’s hardly news either that the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is lying to you about the Equality Act. For the uninitiated, HRC bills itself as the world’s largest supporter and advocate of gay, lesbian, &c, &c, &c, rights and interests. Of course, this is nonsense. HRC exclusively supports hard-left ideological positions, while a very large percentage of gays, and some lesbians, are sensible center/right people who are certainly not represented by HRC’s pronouncements and interference. In fact, in the left’s own hyperventilative terms, the HRC actively and aggressively marginalizes and even erases center/right gays and lesbians.

The left insists erasure is a capital offense – unless the people being erased disagree with their politics. Then, you know, omelets and eggs, comrade.

The subject of HRC’s lies this time is the Equality Act. The act is sold, as the name suggests, as another effort in the long march toward equal rights before the law for everyone. And so the friendly face of the act is its ban on discrimination against gay people at work and elsewhere.

This is the friendly face because it’s relatively noncontroversial. Majorities of Americans oppose workplace discrimination against anyone. So the bait and switch: HRC and its allies get people and corporations to agree that such discrimination is bad, and then loudly proclaim that they endorse the whole bill.

An astonishing amount of mendacity is built into that little package.

First, the Potemkin face of the Equality Act is almost entirely meaningless. Last summer, in Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court held that gay people could not be fired because of their sexual orientation. “An employer who fired an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex,” wrote Justice Gorsuch, a largely libertarian Trump appointee. (Remember: Trump embraced gay marriage and inclusion from the jump, unlike his predecessor.) “Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

As a result, the part of the Equality Act that does the thing that people broadly support is unnecessary. It’s kept as part of the bill only to hide the truly repugnant parts of the act.

What’s left, of particular concern, are provisions that would repeal long-standing statutory religious liberties and destroy girls’ and women’s sports. The latter would be achieved by requiring that transgendered girls and women (that is, people who grew up as boys, with boy-style muscles created by testosterone) be permitted to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. If girls and women could compete with such musculatures, we wouldn’t divide up sports teams at all.

Meanwhile, the organizations that pretend to be for equality and nondiscrimination are in fact eager to discriminate, in every way possible, against the majority of Americans. HRC and its allies actively oppose bans on discrimination on the basis of viewpoint and political participation, which most Americans support as part of opposing all divisive discrimination. These groups want to cancel anyone who disagrees with them – even gays and lesbians who do, as witness their false pretense of representing all such people but espousing only hard-left views.

When HRC actively embraces viewpoint nondiscrimination laws and actively invites gays and lesbians of all political viewpoints to guide its engagement, in levels about proportional to their broader numbers, then it can be taken seriously as a human-rights organization.

Until then, it’s just a professional-left fraud. And it demonstrates its fraud when it asserts that a long list of companies supports all of the Equality Act, including the actively discriminatory and destructive parts mentioned above. At the National Center for Public Policy Research (my day job), we’ve been asking companies whether they really support the ugly provisions of the act. Many companies have evaded and obscured our questions; others have praised nondiscrimination against gays and lesbians while refusing to say anything about those specific provisions; some have been honest and have expressed their hopes that the worst provisions will be stripped from the bill.

Corporations are allowing fraudulent, discriminatory professional-left outposts to lie about what they are truly willing to support to get them off their backs. This is a problem that can only be solved if we jump on their corporate shoulders until they learn that this is a losing strategy.

And next time you hear some self-righteous pronouncement from HRC & Co., you’ll know what to do with it. HRC long argued against treating gays as second-class citizens and making them feel like morally reprobate inferiors, excluded from the structures and currents of life. Turns out it didn’t object to those behaviors per se. It just wanted to be among the oppressors.

Scott Shepard is a fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research and Deputy Director of its Free Enterprise Project. This was first published at Townhall Finance.