Protect Both Religious Freedom and LGBT Rights: Support the Fairness For All Act, Not the Equality..

[Michie]

...Act

The time has come for people of faith to acknowledge reality and seek a resolution that protects both LGBT civil rights and religious liberty. The Fairness For All Act is a serious effort to reach a sustainable and balanced resolution while there’s still time.

People and institutions with traditional religious beliefs about marriage, family, gender, and sexuality face unprecedented challenges. The culture is rapidly becoming more secular as affiliation with traditional religious institutions declines. According to Gallup, in 1999 70 percent of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque. Two decades later, that number has dropped to 47 percent. Fewer than half of Americans are members of a house of worship.

The precipitous drop in formal religious affiliation roughly tracks the culture’s widespread embrace of same-sex marriage and expansive LGBT rights. Spurred on by compelling accounts of love, loyalty, and hardship, public support for legal same-sex marriage now stands at 67 percent (31 percent opposed), and nondiscrimination protections for LGBT persons in employment command support from about 90 percent of Americans. Corporate, media, academic, and professional leaders now strongly support expansive LGBT rights with few if any reservations. By contrast, protections for longstanding religious freedoms are routinely defamed as a “license to discriminate.” Some faith communities are revising teachings on marriage and sexuality to better accommodate LGBT perspectives.

These tectonic cultural and social shifts are both the cause and effect of equally massive political changes. The Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell holding that same-sex marriage is a federal constitutional right and the Court’s 2020 Bostock decision establishing LGBT employment rights have dramatically changed the cultural and political landscape for religious freedom. Obergefell and Bostockmean that LGBT rights are already a permanent part of our constitutional and civil rights law. The question now is whether those rights will be harmonized with religious rights or trample them.

Continued below.
Protect Both Religious Freedom and LGBT Rights: Support the Fairness For All Act, Not the Equality Act - Public Discourse

 

[Landon Caeli]

...Act

The time has come for people of faith to acknowledge reality and seek a resolution that protects both LGBT civil rights and religious liberty. The Fairness For All Act is a serious effort to reach a sustainable and balanced resolution while there’s still time.

People and institutions with traditional religious beliefs about marriage, family, gender, and sexuality face unprecedented challenges. The culture is rapidly becoming more secular as affiliation with traditional religious institutions declines. According to Gallup, in 1999 70 percent of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque. Two decades later, that number has dropped to 47 percent. Fewer than half of Americans are members of a house of worship.

The precipitous drop in formal religious affiliation roughly tracks the culture’s widespread embrace of same-sex marriage and expansive LGBT rights. Spurred on by compelling accounts of love, loyalty, and hardship, public support for legal same-sex marriage now stands at 67 percent (31 percent opposed), and nondiscrimination protections for LGBT persons in employment command support from about 90 percent of Americans. Corporate, media, academic, and professional leaders now strongly support expansive LGBT rights with few if any reservations. By contrast, protections for longstanding religious freedoms are routinely defamed as a “license to discriminate.” Some faith communities are revising teachings on marriage and sexuality to better accommodate LGBT perspectives.

These tectonic cultural and social shifts are both the cause and effect of equally massive political changes. The Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell holding that same-sex marriage is a federal constitutional right and the Court’s 2020 Bostock decision establishing LGBT employment rights have dramatically changed the cultural and political landscape for religious freedom. Obergefell and Bostockmean that LGBT rights are already a permanent part of our constitutional and civil rights law. The question now is whether those rights will be harmonized with religious rights or trample them.

Continued below.
Protect Both Religious Freedom and LGBT Rights: Support the Fairness For All Act, Not the Equality Act - Public Discourse

I don't Iike to see people mistreated, and I also don't like denying people of their religious convictions, so such a notion would seem sensible to someone like me.

 

[GDL]

It's just a slow demise strategy. The same thing was said about the marriage issue - that it was just "some" of the group that wanted it & that they had no real issues with religion otherwise. A few decades later and we're having to fend off attacks against religious freedom and the reality of gender.

No matter how reasonable the religious try to be for "peace," the underlying reality is that it's not reality. Anti-Christ does not want peace.

Love neighbor is a command in the context of rebuking neighbor for being out of line with God.

 

[iarwain]

It's just a slow demise strategy. The same thing was said about the marriage issue - that it was just "some" of the group that wanted it & that they had no real issues with religion otherwise. A few decades later and we're having to fend off attacks against religious freedom and the reality of gender.

No matter how reasonable the religious try to be for "peace," the underlying reality is that it's not reality. Anti-Christ does not want peace.

And Jesus said "I come not to bring peace but a sword". The battle lines have been drawn.

Inch by inch, year by year, decade by decade, the country is being drawn more and more to the left. Which means the country is being drawn more and more towards atheism. We have moved from tolerating LGBTQ to promoting LGBTQ, instead of traditional Judeo-Christian values. Christian values today are increasingly being seen as bigoted and intolerant.

The 70% who belonged to houses of worship 20 years ago have raised their children, and now 47% belong to houses of worship. This generation will raise their children, and what will it be in another 20 years? 24%? Less? Families are barely staying together anymore, let alone Christian families.

 

[GDL]

The 70% who belonged to houses of worship 20 years ago have raised their children, and now 47% belong to houses of worship. This generation will raise their children, and what will it be in another 20 years? 24%? Less? Families are barely staying together anymore, let alone Christian families.

And then there's the matter of how many in the assemblies are wheat and how many are weeds? And then, how many are Biblically illiterate / in perpetual infancy due to the sorry state of many assemblies? These problems have been pointed out for a few generations now. To some it is no surprise where we are today - tragic, but not a surprise.