Penna Dexter

The Equality Act has passed the House of Representatives and awaits a Senate vote. It’s a priority for the president who says he wants it passed in his first 100 days.

The law makes sexual orientation and gender identity protected categories under civil rights law. Elevating public protections for LGBTQ activities diminishes protections for religious people and organizations. The Equality Act would define much of what churches, and religious people and organizations do as “public accommodations.” So, religious schools, hospitals, and other ministries would be forced to operate under a gender ideology that violates the core of what they believe. They’d be required to take actions they know would seriously harm other human beings. Among them: the perpetration of medical atrocities on people uncomfortable with their God-given gender.

The Equality Act is an egregious assault on religious liberty. But it goes further. It’s an attack on what everyone sees.

Margaret Harper McCarthy is a professor at John Paul II Institute. Her recent Wall Street Journal op-ed is entitled “The Equality Act Is at War With Reality.”

“At stake,” she writes, “is the freedom of rational human beings to use a common vocabulary when speaking about what all can see.” This is not about theological beliefs, like the Trinity. “Rather,” she writes, “the Equality Act concerns things everyone can see and understand.”  Nursing babies know their mothers are the ones nursing them, not their fathers. Sexual difference is obvious.

If truths about the human body are only “beliefs,” Professor McCarthy wonders “why object so vociferously to these particular ‘beliefs’?” Her answer: “Because they make especially strong claims on us.”

There’s a revolution that denies the obvious, denies the visible reality of two sexes: male and female. Its goal is to eliminate the distinction between the sexes. The professor says it “is now at the doorstep.”

Believers should prepare, because “those who believe in the invisible order are now the last custodians of the visible one.”