Penna Dexter

A question to ask ourselves as we begin a new year is: “What does the Church do when more and more of it becomes apostate?” WORLD magazine reported on an example of this as the boards of two evangelical Christian organizations, the Council for Christian Colleges and the National Association of Evangelicals, quietly passed resolutions supporting an idea called “Fairness for All.”

Increasingly localities are passing Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (or SOGI) laws governing employment, housing, and public accommodations. SOGI laws elevate “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to protected classes at the expense of privacy and religious liberty. Now, there’s a push to bring SOGI to federal civil rights law.

Success in doing this would allow bureaucrats to define commonsense policies as “discrimination.” It would hit Christian organizations, especially colleges, hard. What Christian education-oriented parent, is going to pay for a school that is forced to ignore biological sexual differences in bathroom, locker and dorm room, sports team, even pronoun policies? In class, students might learn the biblical definition of marriage. In practice, university policy would be required to deny it.

So, an association for Christian colleges has signed on to Fairness for All, a compromise whereby evangelical groups would support adding SOGI protections to federal anti-discrimination law in exchange for guarantees of religious liberty being written into the same law.

SOGI laws would be foisted on the culture. But Christian colleges and other organizations would get a pass for now. How fair is that?

Americans are free to live as they want. But as Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson explains, “SOGI laws, including Fairness for All, are not about freedom—they are about coercion. SOGI and Fairness for All are about forcing all Americans to embrace and live out—certain beliefs about human sexuality.”

Fairness for All rightly acknowledges the reality that the traditional view of sexual morality is now the minority view. But this compromise gives away too much.