This month’s victory by Glenn Youngkin in Virginia showed that Republicans can win by contesting the culture wars, but there are still some in the GOP who wish to wave the white flag.
Yesterday, National Review reported on the “Fairness for All” Act, a bill introduced by Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) and co-sponsored by 20 other House Republicans that would write “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” into civil rights law—paving the way for allowing biological males in women’s sports and private spaces as well as other radical consequences—in return for modest exemptions for some religious institutions.
Terry Schilling, president of American Principles Project (APP), explained the significant problem with this proposal:
Critics argue that the legislation’s costs far outweigh its benefits. “The real question to ask [the bill’s supporters] is: Does the LGBT movement not have enough power already?” Terry Schilling…tells National Review. “Because the last I checked, you get fired for opposing same-sex marriage, you get your bakery protested and shut down for not wanting to make gay wedding cakes, and you get fired from your job for not wanting to lie to students about their gender identity being separate from their biological sex.
“They already have a lot of power, and they’re abusing it,” Schilling says. “They’re using it to oppress people and to coerce them into embracing their worldview.”
Last month, APP’s Jon Schweppe also wrote on Substack in opposition to the legislation:
The sponsors pretend to have worked out a lasting truce. But is there any reason to believe that the lines they’ve drawn will last? What assurance could anyone have? The fight over gay marriage was just about letting people live their lives, right? No, of course not. Grow up. This is a zero sum game. The Left and Right are fighting over the same field.
It’s an unstable peace for the Right to unilaterally surrender 90% of it and sit in hope that their enemies will be satisfied. A serious contender for the Democratic nomination last primary season already suggested attacking churches directly for refusing to toe the ideological line on SOGI. And the near-unanimous opinion of the Democratic Party, including the current president, is that the religious “protections” — which do not appear in the Equality Act they support — are not necessary. The securities of this compromise exist only in the sponsors’ imagination.
And the cost of their “compromise” is enormous. These Republican sponsors are willing to accept the most horrendous outcomes to avoid their own discomfort. The price of their surrender is the chemical castration of children, the criminalization of truth-telling, the ghettoization of religious practice to explicitly church-affiliated institutions, the destruction of women’s sports, the required admission of men to battered women’s shelters, and more. In return for this, they gain absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, they enforce policies nationwide that foreseeably result in rape, mutilation, and misery.
You can read Schweppe’s full essay here.
