Reframing Religious Liberty

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ENDA, Mary Griggs, Religion

(c) by Mary Griggs
We have seen in the debates about the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act to the fights for marriage equality a reframing of the term ‘religious liberty.’

Religious liberty is an idea essential to America. It even predates the foundation of our Republic as religious persecution was the reason so many of our forbearers left the Old World.

In order to accommodate concerns about religious liberty a lot of LGBT equality legislation (and some health care bills) contains broad exemptions for religious organizations. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough for some people. There are religious extremists who are now demanding that any exemptions apply to any individual who objects to the law for moral reasons.

Across the nation, including here in Louisiana, legislators have or are proposing laws to give stronger legal standing to people who claim the government burdened their ability to practice their religion. Such legislation protects “sincerely held religious beliefs” from infringement unless there is “a compelling governmental interest.”

Instead of fighting for the right to practice their beliefs, owners of small businesses are claiming that they can’t provide a service like photography or wedding cakes for same-sex couples because it is “against their religion.” They are then treated as heroes by Faux News pundits, especially when they lose due to non-discrimination protections.

Even worse is how protections against sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination are being denigrated by religious extremists. Just last year, Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) appeared on Tony Perkins’s radio show to describe Employment Non-discrimination legislation as “part of this administration’s ongoing war on religion.”

At the beginning of March, the Family Research Council sent out a fundraising email warning its members that this “dangerous” bill is possible. Tony Perkins explained that ENDA would “give special rights to men and women who engage in homosexual behavior.” He even had a list of reasons to be against it-

ENDA–the Employment Non-Discrimination Act–is dangerous. It feeds on freedom, primarily the freedom of religion and speech: not in theory, but on a practical, everyday level. It leaves few freedoms behind.

Yes, the bill has a fair-sounding name, but in fact, ENDA would give special rights to men and women who engage in homosexual behavior. It will force Christian schools and colleges, Christian-owned businesses, day care centers, and other organizations to employ people who make their sexual behavior an issue as they parade their proclivities into the workplace.

In Tony Perkins’s America, having a job is a “special right” that LGBT people do not deserve.

Employment non discrimination enjoys widespread public support — indeed, far greater public support than does marriage equality. Polling of likely 2012 voters by the Center for American Progress showed nearly three-fourths supporting protections from workplace discrimination. Even among voters with an unfavorable view of gay people, half supported workplace protections.

Discrimination is not an American value and it is not religious value.

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism coordinated over 35 religious congregations, organizations and institutions to release a letter in 2012 decrying workplace discrimination against LGBT employees and publicly endorsing ENDA.

By all means, religious institutions should not be compelled to violate the religious precepts on which they are founded. We can respect the protections for religious institutions afforded by the First Amendment and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 while ensuring that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are protected from baseless discrimination in the workplace.

Allowing religious extremists to reframe the issue for individual beliefs, however, will hinder our path to equality. A business which chooses to be “no LGBT’s allowed” because of the business owner’s religious beliefs should not be given a free pass.

Do we want to live in a world where social workers are allowed to refuse services to LGBT people, where schools get to fire unmarried women for becoming pregnant, where doctors can refuse to treat AIDS patients, where pharmacies decide not to fill prescriptions for birth control or where florists can refuse to sell flowers to gay and lesbian couples?

Businesses should not be allowed to discriminate and claim religious liberty as the basis.

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Here is my Forum For Equality blog post on the Louisiana Fair Employment Act (HB 85).

The Forum For Equality Blog

All hard-working employees should have the chance to earn a living and provide for themselves and their families. No one should live in fear that they can be fired for reasons that have nothing to do with their job performance nor should our state risk losing the best and brightest to other states that value diversity.

House Bill 85, the Louisiana Fair Employment Act, would amend state protections and add safeguards from discrimination in public employment based on sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.

Currently, the cities of Lafayette, Shreveport, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Lake Charles, and Monroe all have policies protecting public workers from employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity.

Protecting workers from discrimination in employment is simply good business. In 2011, it was reported that 87% of Fortune 500 companies have employment non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation, and 41% have policies…

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Equality Louisiana Legends Award

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LGBT Equality, Mary Griggs

The 2013 Louisiana Queer conference was held this weekend and I was honored to be a recipient of the Equality Louisiana Legends Award.

The LA Queer Conference provides leadership development, networking opportunities, and social support to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) college students and their allies in Louisiana. The conference provides an annual venue for individuals to discuss ideas and collaborate on projects, while building a statewide network to advance the LGBTQ movement.

Equality Louisiana works to achieve full equality for all Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people in Louisiana by supporting the development and on-going success of strong LGBT college, local, regional, statewide, and allied organizations while also providing a collective voice for the expansion of civil rights through policy and legislative advocacy.

Justice Did Not Ruin Their Lives

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Mary Griggs, Rant, Violence, Women's Rights

(c) by Mary Griggs

It has taken me a while to write this blog post. The entire situation in Steubenville sickened and enraged me beyond my ability to craft a coherent response.

To start with, it took quite an effort to bring justice to Ohio. This case was being swept under the rug until it was broken by a blogger and then exposed by the hacker group Anonymous. Only then did the police and prosecuters finally do their jobs. In the end, though, when the trial concluded, the young men were found guilty.

In response to the verdict, the media reacted with sympathy for the “ruined” lives of the young men. The talking heads feared they would be labeled as sex offenders for the rest of their lives and had no concern that the young woman would be a rape survivor for the rest of hers.

In Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller stated: “Rape is a crime not of lust but of violence and power. The threat, use and cultural acceptance of sexual force is a pervasive process of intimidation that affects all women.”

If there was ever a more clear example of rape being about power and not sex, this was it. These guys were football heroes and could have enjoyed any amount of female companionship. Instead, they took a classmate who was incapable of consent and publicly debased her, capturing their attack on video and in photos and posting them online.

These aren’t nice boys. Nice boys do not take a girl who is incapacitated by alcohol and drag her semi-conscious body from party to party, assaulting her at every stop along the way. This was not a nice experience for her, even if one of the boys texted the girl after he was (finally) kicked off the football team to tell her “I’ll just never do anything nice for you again.” Furthermore, those weren’t nice people who joked and laughed at what was happening. Nice people get help; they try to stop violence and they seek justice for the vulnerable members of our society. They certainly do not threaten and menace her.

But these two young men aren’t monsters, either. Calling rapists monsters absolves the rapists of their responsibility for their actions and allows society to shirk their culpability in the cultural acceptance of sexual force. We live in a rape culture and Steubenville illustrates that.

Nor was this a vis major or a freak accident. They didn’t accidentally strip, penetrate, videotape and denigrate their victim. They deliberately did these things, not once but several times over the course of the evening, all the while texting about their actions. While the abuse of alcohol can complicate the issue of consent, the footage and twitter feed, from the two young men to the bystanders, shows that they all knew their actions were inappropriate at best and criminal at worst.

Statutory rape is rape; date rape is rape; digitally penetrating an intoxicated 16 year old woman who cannot consent is rape. Quite simply rape is rape.

Let us be perfectly clear – receiving justice for their heinous acts did not harm their “promising futures.” It was their decision to rape that did that.

If the State or society does nothing to deter or punish rape, it becomes easier to adopt the false narrative that it is up to the woman to avoid rape and not up to men not to rape.

Hopefully, the judge’s decision in this case can work to change that narrative and help prevent another Steubenville in the future. Of course, if there are no consequences for the enablers (coaches, parents, police) or their peers, we won’t have evolved as a society at all.

There is a part of me that thinks if these young men get a big slice of karma pie in prison, it is just them reaping what they have sown.

The other part remembers reading the trilogy Oresteia and the tragedy of  revenge. As the Furies said, “Guilt both ways, and who can call it justice?” (The Eumenides, l.155)

Dereliction of Duty

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Mary Griggs, Rant

(c) by Mary Griggs

Ever go on a political rant, only to be told by a listener that they don’t pay attention to politics? Or talked about a candidate or upcoming election and had someone tell you they don’t vote?

In my opinion, “I don’t pay attention to politics” is one of the most ignorant statements a person can make. I believe political illiteracy leads to the destruction of democracy even more surely than voter suppression.

Unfortunately for our country, political non-participation is rampant: while 123 million people voted in November 2012, 93 million eligible people did not. The reasons might be varied but those who failed to do so are guilty of dereliction of duty to our nation.

Politics doesn’t only refer to politicians. Politics also means the issues – foreign affairs, human rights, taxes, immigration, the environment, etc. Decisions about these sort of things don’t just happen on election day. Every day across the nation and in the Capital, bills get passed that benefit a minority of Americans because the majority of eligible voters either have been misled or are silent.

Our Republic depends on people having at least some engagement in the system. We need to educate ourselves about the issues and how they affect us. We must question the voices of power that try to influence our votes. We have a right to know which legislators favor campaign contributors over constituents. We have a duty to monitor and hold accountable those in power for what they do in our names.

When the only people involved in politics are the radicalized, you get a situation like we’re currently in where the House is taken over by ideologues whose opinions are clearly not shared by a majority of citizens.

Politics is important, y’all. As Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Thoughtcrime, Superman and Orson Scott Card

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LGBT Equality, Marriage Equality, Mary Griggs, Rant

(c) by Mary Griggs

I was asked the following question in a thread on Facebook about DC Comic’s decision to shelve the controversial story written by Orson Scott Card: “What does Card’s view on homosexuality have to do with Superman? This is about trying to punish Card for thoughtcrime.”

The ‘thoughtcrime’ allusion is to George Orwell’s book 1984 and the Party’s Thought Police who monitor and arrest anyone who attempts to challenge authority or the status quo.

The most insidious thing about those who talk about thought police and political correctness is they’ve turned it all around. My calling Orson Scott Card out for being a bigot doesn’t put me in the role of a government agent. In reality, I’m part of the resistance movement fighting against an orthodoxy that demands their narrow definition of marriage be kept the law of the land despite the fact that numerous scholars, faiths and individuals – in fact, a little over half the population of the United States – disagrees with them.

Disdain for ‘political correctness’ is often positioned as a concern that some important truth is not being spoken for fear of offending someone. Accusations of ‘thoughtcrime’ are made to supposedly warn us that someone is being silenced for having an unpopular opinion. That is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Political correctness means acknowledging that everyone is vulnerable to emotional harm and that for many people this emotional harm comes from the attitudes of society. When I call out someone for sexist, homophobic, etc. remarks, it is not to silence them. I don’t want them to stop talking. What I want them to do is think about what they say and how it can be hurtful and, further, how it can then be used to deny other people their basic human rights.

Being politically correct means fighting for my belief in equality, standing up for my faith in democracy and staying true to my conviction that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. When I am being politically correct, I am upholding the very values that Superman symbolizes.

The man with the ‘S’ on his chest embodies “truth, justice and the American Way.” He lives by the moral values instilled in him by his foster parents and proves over and over, in universe after universe, that he is a true hero, capable of whatever bravery and self-sacrifice is necessary to right a wrong or save a life.

On the other hand, Orson Scott Card’s opinions about homosexuality, marriage equality and feminism are very well documented and very much out of the mainstream. On his blog, he vigorously denounces marriage equality and broadcasts his views that homosexuality is an unnatural “aberration” and “a reproductive dysfunction.” Further, Card became a board member of the National Organization of Marriage in 2009, a political non-profit that works against the legalization of same-sex marriage by using lies and fear mongering in their campaigns across the nation.

Neither me nor any of the other activists are going after Card for his thoughts but for what he has said. To have a Superman story penned by Orson Scott Card would be a betrayal of everything Superman is – Superman has strong moral compass and he stands against bigotry. Card’s advocacy against our basic human rights is the antithesis of what Superman (and America) represents.

Live and Let Live? If only!

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LGBT Equality, Mary Griggs, Rant

(c) by Mary Griggs

Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, is getting quite a reputation for his racially charged statements. Not to be satisfied with offending only one group, he  went on the radio the other day and said:

They (LGBT activists) do not believe in a live and let live philosophy. Let’s be very clear about what their agenda is, their agenda is to have the homosexual lifestyle affirmed by society as healthy and normal and as a perfectly acceptable to young people and to have those who disagree with that ostracized the level of being Ku Klux Klansmen.

It is really hard to respectfully engage with people I disagree with, especially when the disagreements are based on the other sides fundamental disrespect for me as a person. His use of the word lifestyle, when it is clearly my life he is talking about, is a perfect example of that.

Frankly, there can be no ‘live and let live’ when one side has the power to fire (it is legal to fire someone because of their sexual orientation in 29 states), kill (there are 70 countries in the world where homosexuality is illegal and 7 where it is punishable by death), or define the other side’s relationships as less worthy of protection (30 states ban all forms of marriage except one-man-one-woman couples) and the other does not. It is difficult to coexist peacefully with someone who wants to put your rights up to a vote, outlaw any mention of your existence in schools, and fight to deny you custody of your children. Here in Louisiana, morality clauses in rental agreements are legally used to evict LGBT tenants and most public accommodations (hotels, restaurants, bars) are legally able to refuse service based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

But the real issue I have with his statement is about healthy and normal and what is perfectly acceptable.

In 1974 the full membership of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) followed the 1973 recommendation of its board by voting to remove homosexuality as a pathological psychiatric condition from the DSM, which is the official reference book for diagnosing mental disorders. Since that time, sexual orientation has not been seen as the disease but homophobia and social prejudice are.

A 1999 review by researcher Bruce Bagemihl showed that homosexual and bisexual behavior has been observed in close to 1,500 species, ranging from primates to gut worms, and is well documented for 500 of them. How is that for defining what is natural and normal?

Just because a person believes that homosexuality is wrong, doesn’t make that belief right nor is it grounds to make that belief the law of the land. Preventing other human beings from having the same rights that you yourself enjoy – all based on personal prejudice – is not right either.

People like Richard Land simply have to deal with the uncomfortable knowledge that people they disagree with have equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, too many people have a deep down, inescapable vindictiveness against folks they don’t like. In their minds, other people simply cannot be allowed have their way, even if doing so makes no difference in their own lives.

They scream: “Marriage is between a man and a woman! Only straight boys can be Scouts! Non-procreative sex is a sin! The world is ours and you can’t have it!”

They don’t even realize they are sounding like spoiled brats. What is most infuriating, though, is they aren’t even being denied something that costs them anything. It is like the air we breath. They are looking at people and saying, “No! Queers can’t share our air! Air is only for straights! Go breathe something else but not as good as air!”

We went through this already in the Civil Rights movement and Brown vs. Board of Education. “Separate but equal” is not equal. Every citizen of this country should have the same legal rights, not some second-class variation thereof. What churches want to do in their own private religious ceremonies is their business but, before the law, we are all equal.

One thing Richard Land said does resonate with me. I am a liberal lesbian activist and I believe there could be social utility in ostracizing those whose behavior is unacceptable. In the same manner that most citizens shun the Klan’s spectacles of racism, I think those who who celebrate their homophobia and transphobia by trying to enshrine discrimination into law should be excluded from the public square.

Unfortunately, the pain of exclusion is more likely to breed alienation than acceptance and intolerance very rarely leads to more tolerance.

I guess I should be satisfied with changing the laws that discriminate and leave the changing of hearts to others. As the very wise Dr Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”