The ‘Equality’ Act doesn’t really protect anybody. It undermines human freedom and dignity by legally stripping Americans across the board of inalienable rights.
Stella Morabito By Stella Morabito
APRIL 22, 2019
Let’s place ourselves, for a moment, into the mindset of a statist. If you and your cronies wanted to control everybody’s lives, how exactly would you go about getting such raw power? Obviously, you wouldn’t come right out and say you have a special project designed specifically to cement a permanent one-party state.

You wouldn’t explain, full disclosure, that the ever-growing bureaucracy you have in mind would promote a surveillance state and coercion that produces toxic levels of social distrust. You wouldn’t clarify that the point is to keep tabs on everyone in every aspect of their lives, including their education, their businesses, their medicine, their housing, their families, and their churches.

No, of course not. You would mask your self-supremacist intentions with a benign and trendy word like “equality.� You’d pretend that your project was about helping a vulnerable minority. To prevent scrutiny, you’d quickly shame anybody who had a question about it and defame them as haters. At the same time, you’d give special favors to those who can be persuaded to support your con job.

That’s usually how such things are done, as the history of authoritarian systems proves.

Sowing a Colossal Inequality of Power
So we have the “Equality� Act, recently introduced by Democrats in Congress. It’s currently being considered in various committee hearings and is on track for a floor vote in the House of Representatives later this spring or early this summer.

On the surface, the “Equality� Act is supposed to protect LGBT folks from discrimination by adding the categories of sexual orientation and gender identity to all federal civil rights laws, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It would make claims of discrimination related to these characteristics legally actionable in the way racism is, and aapplying to virtually every area of life: the workplace, education, banking, jury service, federal funding, housing, medicine and psychiatry, and all public facilities.

It is a power grab in the guise of anti-discrimination. A bait-and-switch. It’s another attempt by a ruling micro-clique to exert mega-control over everyone else’s lives, including those it purports to protect. It allows the Mass State to maximize bureaucracy and social engineering, especially by its huge regulation of speech and expression. It erodes individual rights while claiming to uphold them.

Sane people of goodwill have a host of good reasons to object to the so-called Equality Act. And many of those reasons have been written up, including the de-sexing of toilets and showers, the compelled speech inherent in pronoun protocols and severe punishment for “misgendering,� the promised harassment of business owners, the invasion of girls’ and women’s sports by biological men who force on them an unequal playing field, the utter contempt for individual conscience, and more.

The net result of this act would be a huge inequality of power accrued to the state and drained from the individual. Below I offer five general reasons to object to this legislation.

I think they give us a more macro view of how it would destabilize a free society, by 1) undermining the First Amendment; 2) threatening the rule of law; 3) nudging us towards a social credit system; 4) redefining humanity; and 5) enshrining identity politics in law. In short, the “Equality� Act doesn’t really protect anybody. It undermines human freedom and dignity by legally stripping Americans across the board of inalienable rights.

1. It Undermines Everyone’s First Amendment Rights
Our First Amendment freedoms of religion, speech, press, and association are clearly targeted by the “Equality� Act. It explicitly invalidates the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act so that anybody caught in this bill’s legal web is pre-emptively stripped of the right to express his or her conscience without loss of liberty and property.

So the mask is off. All prior promises of conscience clauses in past incarnations of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) laws are hereby exposed as bait intended only to push through bad laws until conscience protections could be abolished.

This act would suspend the right to free expression in secular daily life. There can be no question that it will lead to compelled speech. One huge hint is the 2015 New York law that compels speech by slapping a fine of up to $250,000 for the crime of using a sex-matched pronoun on someone who doesn’t want that. Federal law would take a page from Twitter, which suspends the accounts of users who are viewed as not compliant with transgender politics.

Freedom of association would also take a big hit. With its emphases on perceptions of gender identity (both self-perception and one’s perceptions of gender identity), a defendant who may have been perceived to raise an eyebrow can be threatened with loss of livelihood and even jail time. It’s bound to sow social distrust and a fear of guilt by association with a defendant.

It will also have huge repercussions for freedom of association. As I’ll note below, the Equality Act would erase sex distinctions in law, which means open war on family relationships. We’ve already seen a court removing of parental custody of a minor child identifying as transgender for refusing to have their child injected with powerful hormones.

It also places Big Brother into the therapist’s office by banning any sort of talk therapy that might lead to a patient undoing a transgender decision or going from gay to straight, even if the patient wanted to do so. This one-way street goes under the moniker “conversion therapy,� which the “Equality� Act explicitly bans.

Nevermind that there are already plenty of laws against coercion and medical malpractice on the books. A ban on so-called conversion therapy uses a few cases of malpractice essentially to ban open conversations with a cognitive therapist. This is not the sort of law a free people seek. It is reminiscent, however, of the sort of law cult leaders have always sought to prevent people from leaving the cult.

2. The Ambiguities in the Bill Threaten the Rule of Law
The first thing that should hit any reader of the so-called Equality Act is the ambiguity of its language, especially with the bill’s outright emphasis throughout on “perceptions.�

We should ask ourselves: How does the rule of law survive such intangibles? The bill is set up to pass harsh judgments on how people are perceived or how people perceive things. Such haziness is guaranteed to create wide latitude for an arbitrary system of punishment and rewards, with no regard for (or even much possibility for) due process.

It would have to calculate your intent, read your mind, check out your body language, pick you apart for any suggestion of malice.
It injects into numerous federal anti-discrimination laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a new protected class that is defined not by an immutable and noticeable characteristic like race and sex, nor of a person’s religious beliefs, which are inherent to First Amendment protections.

more....................
http://thefederalist.com/2019/04/22/called-equality-act-bait-switch-power-grab/

Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.