Big Business Sides With Leftists In Pushing Highly Destructive ‘Equality Act’ AND Medical, legal experts warn of Equality Act’s impact on parents, kids and religious freedom
Reported FEBRUARY 26, 2021 By Emily Jashinsky
The country’s most powerful business interests are openly collaborating with a radical advocacy group to push sweeping legislation that would set women back decades at the expense of an extreme, elite agenda. The left’s historic skepticism of corporate power has morphed into a demand for more of it.
The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT activist group with far-left interests, has assembled a coalition of the world’s most powerful corporations to support the Equality Act. Scroll through the incredible list and you’ll find massive corporations from Amazon to Bain to Best Buy aligned with HRC’s radical mission.
The Equality Act, passed by the House on Thursday, is a deeply radical bill that would put women in danger, erode free speech and religious rights, and destroy Title IX gains for girls’ sports. These claims about its potential consequences are not a cartoonish right-wing intimidation campaign — they are agreed upon by conservatives and honest progressive, feminist experts alike.
Republicans and Democrats should not be intimidated by the far-left’s false advertising of the bill as a commonsense measure to protect oppressed and vulnerable members of the public. There are ways to protect transgender Americans that do not involve putting women in danger while quashing free speech, girls’ sports, and religious freedom.
Corporate America, along with the media, is now run by extremists who’ve brought radical cultural leftism from academia into the corridors of power. They now share the very same cultural priorities as far-left groups like HRC. The effect of this shared cultural consensus is that businesses use their corporate power to push radical cultural leftism on the rest of the country because the media demands and cheerleads such efforts, eliminating the risk of bad press.
The strain of elite leftism that dominates our corporate institutions operates on a firm progressive-or-bigot binary, meaning even a pro-trans leftist like J.K. Rowling faces intense charges of bigotry because she’s skeptical of extreme aspects of the trans agenda. That means baby boomer bosses are intimidated into signing onto efforts like HRC’s Equality Act push and millennial executives and journalists demand it.
Because this progressive-or-bigot binary has such a chilling effect on free expression, extreme elements of the trans agenda like undermining Title IX, hormone treatments for children, and men in women’s shelters are enforced without robust debate. The cost of speaking up far outweighs the benefit for most people.
As a consequence, corporate elites are rendering everyday Americans powerless, colluding to enforce new, radical cultural norms by disempowering the working class to speak up, earn scholarships, or sleep soundly in a shelter for victims of domestic violence. It’s the very reason Abigail Shrier had to write “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” — the normalization of radical new standards for sex and gender are having dangerous real-world consequences, especially for young women.
HRC and its “Business Coalition” are proud of immense corporate power. Here’s how the group describes the campaign on its website: “Launched in March 2016, the 364 member companies of HRC’s Business Coalition for the Equality Act have operations in all 50 states, headquarters spanning 33 states and a combined $6 trillion in revenue, and employ over 13.1 million people in the United States.”
This is a leftist group bragging that it represents Big Business to the tune of a combined $6 trillion in revenue and control over the livelihoods of 13 million people. This is Big Business bragging that it supports the agenda of cultural extremists.
Certainly, HRC’s effort is more evidence of the dissolving marriage between economic leftists and cultural ones. Capitalists are now cultural leftists.
More importantly, however, it’s evidence of an elite effort to wield corporate power over working people in the interest of an extreme cultural agenda. The Equality Act is a plaything of the elites that will disempower working people, and lawmakers should not be intimidated into believing the legislation is anything else.
Medical, legal experts warn of Equality Act’s impact on parents, kids and religious freedom
Legal and medical experts and concerned parents have warned that the Equality Act, which passed in the House Thursday, will have lasting implications on children, parental rights, and religious freedom if it becomes law. The 500-plus page bill, which passed by a vote of 224-206 adds sex, gender identity and sexual orientation to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The measure was reintroduced in the House where it was first passed in 2019 before it stalled in the Senate. It adds sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories in nondiscrimination law. The measure also strips away key religious liberty provisions and conscience protections in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Its effects would be far-reaching because it redefines “public accommodation” to include “any establishment” that provides a service, including churches, shelters operated by religious groups, faith-based adoption agencies, and educational institutions associated with religious denominations and associations.
The three Republicans who joined Democrats in voting for the measure included Reps. Tom Reed and John Katko, both of New York, and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.
During a virtual event hosted by the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday, Rep. Vicki Hartzler, R-Mo., and Autumn Leva of the Family Policy Alliance, detailed various concerns they have about the Equality Act and its implications for Americans if it’s passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Joe Biden.
Other speakers at the Heritage event were Maria Keffler of Partners for Ethical Care, Dr. Michelle Cretella of the American College of Pediatricians, and Greg Baylor of Alliance Defending Freedom.
Hartzler, a former teacher and track coach, explained that the bill, if enacted, would erase all the gains that women have made in athletics by allowing trans-identified males to compete in girls’ sports. Thus far, 20 states have introduced legislation intended to keep sports sex-segregated.
If the bill becomes law “we won’t have women’s sports that are fair,” added Hartzler, who derided it as the “Inequality Act.” 
Parental rights are also in serious jeopardy with this potential law, she continued. If the Act passes in the Senate it will filter down to what is taught in public school classrooms and parents won’t be able to object to content because it will be seen as a discrimination issue.
Similarly, parents’ rights to make healthcare decisions for their children would erode with the Act, according to Hartzler, referencing a 2018 case where a judge removed custody from the parents because they objected to their 17-year-old child being prescribed experimental cross-sex hormones.
“If this passes nationwide we could see parents facing a similar situation all over the country,” she said.
Hartzler is supporting the Heritage Foundation’s Promise To America’s Children, a national movement the think-tank has put forward to oppose the Equality Act and, more broadly, the imposition of gender ideology on children in the public sphere. The Promise, as Heritage states, aims to “create and support laws that will protect children’s health, safety, and families — especially their relationships with their parents, who have the primary responsibility to love, protect, and educate them.”
During the 90-minute House debate over the bill on Thursday, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., claimed the Equality Act posed no threat to religious freedom and that such concerns being raised by Republicans were “ridiculous.” Maloney then accused the bill’s opponents of using religious freedom as a ruse to conceal their “pro-discrimination against gay people.”
In response to Maloney’s accusations, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, declared: “Here it is, on page 25. It says specifically, ‘The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 shall not provide a legal basis for a claim’ [against a religious discrimination charge].
“The founders said in the first right, in the First Amendment to the Constitution, you can practice your religion as you see fit. But right here in their bill today, the Democrats say ‘No you can’t,’” Jordan asserted.
Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., also derided Republicans’ religious freedom arguments as nothing more than “transphobia,” “homophobia,” and “hate,” The Epoch Times reported.
PLEASE SEE: Rand Paul likens child sex-change procedures to ‘genital mutilation’ while grilling Biden’s transgender HHS nominee | What Did You Say?
During the Heritage Foundation’s panel Tuesday, Cretella of the American College of Pediatricians noted how the issue of gender dysphoria in children has become politicized. It’s this politicization that she says has corrupted the entire profession of medicine. The vast majority of medical professionals, therapists, and counselors believe that the best course of treatment for the condition is to first take a very thorough psychological assessment of the child in pursuit of underlying factors, she explained.
“Those in authority over the medical education system and directives to practicing physicians now recommend that all children, regardless of their age, be affirmed in their gender confusion. We are essentially gaslighting children into the lie that they could be born in the wrong body,” Cretella said in her remarks.
This, then, will put them on a medical pathway in which their normal puberty will be chemically arrested and will be followed up by opposite-sex hormones, she added. The combination of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones yields potentially lifelong sterility.
“We already have physically healthy girls as young as 13 being referred for double mastectomies. This is institutionalized child abuse,” she asserted. “We are taking emotionally troubled youth, psychologically abusing them by reinforcing their gender-sexual confusion, and then experimenting on them with toxic drugs and mutilating surgeries.”
Cretella has been contacted by doctors both domestically and internationally who say that it is now “career-ending” for them to suggest to a family or to their colleagues in a professional setting that these dysphoric children need a psychological assessment.
“Cancel culture has arrived in medicine and psychology and it’s very frightening,” she said.
Asked what she thinks could happen in 10 years should the Equality Act become law, Cretella said medical professionals who object to gender-transitioning of children and believe in the principle of “first do no harm” will be eliminated from practice. The ones you’ll be left with are the ones who believe in “experiment first, ask questions later.”
Maria Keffler noted that among the most concerning aspects of radical gender ideology that is all the rage in culture is how young schoolchildren are being instructed by teachers using curricula that is not factual or rooted in science.
“And we’re teaching this to our children en masse. It’s shocking when you see what’s being done in the schools … and where it’s coming from. … It’s about making money. It’s about furthering an agenda.
“Children are being taught from kindergarten upward that some boys have a vagina, some girls have a penis, and that kids can be any gender they want to be, she continued.
Keffler recounted that she has heard stories of elementary school children being asked to stand up in class to tell everyone about their “gender identity.” She added that she can no longer, in good conscience, say that public schools are safe places for children. Many people still don’t realize how dire the situation has become, she asserted, especially as some school officials advise teachers to deceive parents by allowing students to lead double lives by portraying an opposite-gender identity while at school.
The Equality Act will exacerbate this highly politicized approach within medicine, psychology, education, and other professional fields, according to Greg Baylor of Alliance Defending Freedom. Because of the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in nondiscrimination provisions, any entity that receives federal taxpayer dollars is subject to such policies. Among the largest recipients of taxpayer funds are public schools.
When asked whether religious freedom protections outlined in federal law would be preserved if the Equality Act becomes law, the ADF attorney noted the lack of religious exemptions in the bill. At the state and local level where similar statutes have been adopted, such carve-outs are present.
“But with the Equality Act you have none of that, there is no exemption for religious employers, there is no exemption for religious foster care providers, there is no exemption for religious schools.”
It is debated whether existing legal provisions can protect certain religious entities from discrimination claims, such as Title VII in the Civil Rights Act, the section pertaining to employment and section in the Fair Housing Act, the provisions of which would likely apply to religious colleges that have sex-segregated dormitories.
But the most destructive feature is how the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is impacted, he said, a law that was passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis and signed into law by former President Bill Clinton. The Equality Act expressly forbids invoking RFRA from the portions of the civil rights laws that it amends.
This previous approach to religious liberty is “gone, I’m afraid,” he said, “and it’s even to the point of essentially repealing large chunks of RFRA.”
When a federal law conflicts with state law, federal law wins, he said. Thus, if a state statute establishes that males who identify as female cannot participate in girls’ scholastic sports, the Equality Act’s revisions to Title XI would trump the state law. 
Reported By 
The new law would be called the 
Reported by Joshua Gill | 6:35 PM 06/19/2017
after Democrats labeled it as a school that discriminates against LGBT students during Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ congressional hearing. The Lighthouse Christian Academy of Bloomington, Ind. has been the center of the debate about school choice ever since Senate Democrats claimed that the school discriminated against LGBT students, according to an 
Reported By 
community branded Berkman 
Commentary by Dr. Michael Brown Guest Blogger, Distinguished Author, Speaker and Christian Apologist | Monday, June 19, 2017 @ 1:51 PM
Posted on October 1, 2016
Never mind that the organizations that support Dems do this all the time. 
Across the country states have been 
gender identity in communications with employee and with others.”
This is exactly why legislatures and voters in dozens of states have been working so hard to pass the defense of religious liberty laws, and exactly why the liberals in those states have fought so hard to kill them. While the liberals have been telling us that there is no reason to worry, Massachusetts has a very different story to tell us. We cannot trust these liberals who attempt to assuage our feelings with soft words, because they most certainly will be stabbing us in the back the first chance they get…
Casey Harper 05/15/2016
the infamous North Carolina “Bathroom Bill.” Infamous in that it states if you’re a guy, regardless of how you are dressed or the way you “feel” that particular moment, you must use the guys public restroom, locker room, shower, etc. If you are a girl – vice versa.
their children to be brainwashed in the state-run schools. It should not be a hard connection to make between the loss of our children and the fact that they attended the same education system. But, one would think that they would at least wait until the second grade to begin the mush mind program. But this is not the case.
retirement.”
They keep telling us that they won’t go after churches, but I know how this works. Once the glitter ball gets a’rolling, the gay mafia won’t stop. As we saw with photographer Elaine Huguenin, it doesn’t matter if there are other accommodations, the lesbian couple sued anyway.
until we begin to look like England. Christians will be arrested for reading the bible aloud on the street. We’re lucky that we have the First Amendment, but so long as activist judges are in control, it offers little comfort. After our freedoms are eroded, American Christians will face a choice they’ve been lucky enough to avoid in modern times: 
A major new report, published today in the journal The New Atlantis, challenges the leading narratives that the media has pushed regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.
Co-authored by two of the nation’s leading scholars on mental health and sexuality, the 143-page report discusses over 200 peer-reviewed studies in the biological, psychological, and social sciences, painstakingly documenting what scientific research shows and does not show about sexuality and gender.
The major takeaway, as the editor of the journal explains, is that “some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence.”
Here are four of the report’s most important conclusions:
The report, “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences,” is co-authored by Dr. Lawrence Mayer and Dr. Paul McHugh. Mayer is a scholar-in-residence in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University.
McHugh, whom the editor of The New Atlantis describes as “arguably the most important American psychiatrist of the last half-century,” is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was for 25 years the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was during his tenure as psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins that he put an end to sex reassignment surgery there, after a study launched at Hopkins revealed that it didn’t have the benefits for which doctors and patients had long hoped.
Implications for Policy
The report focuses exclusively on what scientific research shows and does not show. But this science can have implications for public policy.
Take, for example, our nation’s recent debates over transgender policies in schools. One of the consistent themes of the report is that science does not support the claim that “gender identity” is a fixed property independent of biological sex, but rather that a combination of biological, environmental, and experiential factors likely shape how individuals experience and express themselves when it comes to sex and gender.
The report also discusses the reality of neuroplasticity: that all of our brains can and do change throughout our lives (especially, but not only, in childhood) in response to our behavior and experiences. These changes in the brain can, in turn, influence future behavior.
This provides more reason for concern over the Obama administration’s recent transgender school policies. Beyond the privacy and safety concerns, there is thus also the potential that such policies will result in prolonged identification as transgender for students who otherwise would have naturally grown out of it.
The report reviews rigorous research showing that “only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.” Policymakers should be concerned with how misguided school policies might encourage students to identify as girls when they are boys, and vice versa, and might result in prolonged difficulties. As the report notes, “There is no evidence that all children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior should be encouraged to become transgender.” (If the image below does not play, please proceed to https://youtu.be/O9RE_VD1nf8)
Beyond school policies, the report raises concerns about proposed medical intervention in children. Mayer and McHugh write: “We are disturbed and alarmed by the severity and irreversibility of some interventions being publicly discussed and employed for children.”
They continue: “We are concerned by the increasing tendency toward encouraging children with gender identity issues to transition to their preferred gender through medical and then surgical procedures.” But as they note, “There is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of interventions that delay puberty or modify the secondary sex characteristics of adolescents.”
Findings on Transgender Issues
The same goes for social or surgical gender transitions in general. Mayer and McHugh note that the “scientific evidence summarized suggests we take a skeptical view toward the claim that sex reassignment procedures provide the hoped for benefits or resolve the underlying issues that contribute to elevated mental health risks among the transgender population.” Even after sex reassignment surgery, patients with gender dysphoria still experience poor outcomes:
Mayer and McHugh urge researchers and physicians to work to better “understand whatever factors may contribute to the high rates of suicide and other psychological and behavioral health problems among the transgender population, and to think more clearly about the treatment options that are available.” They continue:
Policymakers should take these findings very seriously. For example, the Obama administration recently finalized a new Department of Health and Human Services mandate that requires all health insurance plans under Obamacare to cover sex reassignment treatments and all relevant physicians to perform them. The regulations will force many physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers to participate in sex reassignment surgeries and treatments, even if doing so violates their moral and religious beliefs or their best medical judgment.
Rather than respect the diversity of opinions on sensitive and controversial health care issues, the regulations endorse and enforce one highly contested and scientifically unsupported view. As Mayer and McHugh urge, more research is needed, and physicians need to be free to practice the best medicine.
Stigma, Prejudice Don’t Explain Tragic Outcomes
The report also highlights that people who identify as LGBT face higher risks of adverse physical and mental health outcomes, such as “depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and most alarmingly, suicide.” The report summarizes some of those findings:
What accounts for these tragic outcomes? Mayer and McHugh investigate the leading theory—the “social stress model”—which proposes that “stressors like stigma and prejudice account for much of the additional suffering observed in these subpopulations.”
But they argue that the evidence suggests that this theory “does not seem to offer a complete explanation for the disparities in the outcomes.” It appears that social stigma and stress alone cannot account for the poor physical and mental health outcomes that LGBT-identified people face.
As a result, they conclude that “More research is needed to uncover the causes of the increased rates of mental health problems in the LGBT subpopulations.” And they call on all of us work to “alleviate suffering and promote human health and flourishing.”
Findings Contradict Claims in Supreme Court’s Gay Marriage Ruling
Finally, the report notes that scientific evidence does not support the claim that people are “born that way” with respect to sexual orientation. The narrative pushed by Lady Gaga and others is not supported by the science. A combination of biological, environmental, and experiential factors likely account for an individual’s sexual attractions, desires, and identity, and “there are no compelling causal biological explanations for human sexual orientation.”
Furthermore, the scientific research shows that sexual orientation is more fluid than the media suggests. The report notes that “Longitudinal studies of adolescents suggest that sexual orientation may be quite fluid over the life course for some people, with one study estimating that as many as 80 percent of male adolescents who report same-sex attractions no longer do so as adults.”
These findings—that scientific research does not support the claim that sexual orientation is innate and immutable—directly contradict claims made by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in last year’s Obergefell ruling. Kennedy wrote, “their immutable nature dictates that same-sex marriage is their only real path to this profound commitment” and “in more recent years have psychiatrists and others recognized that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable.”
But the science does not show this.
While the marriage debate was about the nature of what marriage is, incorrect scientific claims about sexual orientation were consistently used in the campaign to redefine marriage.
In the end, Mayer and McHugh observe that much about sexuality and gender remains unknown. They call for honest, rigorous, and dispassionate research to help better inform public discourse and, more importantly, sound medical practice.
As this research continues, it’s important that public policy not declare scientific debates over, or rush to legally enforce and impose contested scientific theories. As Mayer and McHugh note, “Everyone—scientists and physicians, parents and teachers, lawmakers and activists—deserves access to accurate information about sexual orientation and gender identity.”
We all must work to foster a culture where such information can be rigorously pursued and everyone—whatever their convictions, and whatever their personal situation—is treated with the civility, respect, and generosity that each of us deserves.