Sometimes, I get so wrapped up in covering the news that I forget to take a second, sit back, and really take in just how insane the world truly is. I’ve written a great deal on the dangers of H.R. 5, “The Equality Act,” and why we should contact our senators to oppose it. But it’s easy to forget the magnitude of what happened when the House of Representatives passed the bill last week, and every single Democrat voted for it.
Imagine if Congress got together and drafted a bill stating, “You must agree that 2+2=5. You must refer to groups of four people as ‘five,’ and if you don’t, we’ll fine you. Your schools must alter their math sheets so the answer to 2+2 is 5. Engineers have to alter their calculations to be 5-inclusive. If you keep stubbornly referring to 2+2 as ‘four,’ or if you forget to say ‘five’ more than once, we’ll hound you, we’ll fine you, and we’ll put you in jail for discrimination.”
That would be an absurd abuse of power, and the political party behind it would forever bear the shame of having launched a full-frontal assault on the truth of mathematics. Yet in Congress, Democrats all voted to prop up the idea that men are women if they claim to “identify” that way, and that if you disagree and act on your disagreement, that constitutes “discrimination” and puts you afoul of the law.
Under this law, teenage boys will be allowed to beat teenage girls in sports leagues designed to provide an equal shot for girls. Under this law, men will have full access to women’s rape crisis centers, so long as they claim to identify as women. Under this law, doctors may be forced to provide experimental cross-sex “treatments” that actually cause a disease.
Sure, the Equality Act wouldn’t make bridges fall down — like the 2+2=5 order would — but it would destroy women’s sports, erase women’s right to privacy in sex-segregated spaces, and flip medicine on its head, all in service of a false ideology.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we should be mocking people who suffer with gender confusion. The condition of gender dysphoria is real, serious, and tragic. People really do identify with the gender opposite their biological sex, and the reasons why are not always readily apparent.
However, none of this means that transgender identity is the correct prescription for this horrific malady. Girls suffering from anorexia truly believe that they are fat and they truly desire to lose weight. They may suffer real shame and embarrassment over the shape of their bodies. But that doesn’t mean losing weight is necessarily healthy for them.
Transgenderism essentially involves saying to a thin girl with anorexia, “Yes, you are thin. How dare anyone question your thin identity. Now, let’s do liposuction, stat!” “Transgender medicine” involves pumping people whose bodies are normal and healthy with “puberty-blocking” drugs and hormones and cutting off their perfectly healthy breasts and genitals in the name of “health.”
There is no evidence that transgender surgery improves the mental health outcomes of gender dysphoric people. Men and women who formerly identified as transgender and underwent surgery have grown to reject transgender identity and lament the damage they did to their own bodies.
The plain biological fact is that human beings are male and female, down to the level of DNA. Yes, some people are intersex because they have “disorders of sex development.” These people are not a “third gender” and their existence does not prove that biological sex is not binary. Regardless of the transgender rhetoric, males and females develop differently from conception until natural death, and our chemical makeup is heavily influenced by our sex chromosomes.
Yet, under the Equality Act, the anti-science ideology of transgenderism becomes the default law of the land and a central aspect of anti-discrimination law.
Then there’s the whole enforcement apparatus.
Naturally, millions of Americans wouldn’t just take this assault on biology and common sense lying down. So Democrats had to eviscerate a key federal law.
“The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (42 U.S.C. 2000bb et seq.) shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title,” the bill says.
In other words, the “Equality” Act explicitly carves out an exemption from the right of religious freedom — an exemption that only applies to claims of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Finally, the Equality Act demonizes the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, the central social cornerstone of Western civilization.
The text of H.R. 5 claims that “discrimination against a married same-sex couple could be based on the sex stereotype that marriage should only be between heterosexual couples.”
This “sex stereotype” has provided a firm social foundation for generations and it still provides an anchor of moral sanity in a world increasingly unhinged from reality.
The Equality Act won’t just appease the Left’s rabid LGBT activists — it will erode Western civilization, enshrine absolute falsehood into law, and trample on Americans’ fundamental rights. Even if you don’t agree with social conservatives on same-sex marriage or transgender identity, can you really stand by as our right to dissent is systematically quashed? Is that what America has become?
Don’t forget — every single Democrat in Congress voted for this absurd and dangerous law. Every. Single. One. Americans cannot afford to forget this in 2022.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
