Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries.
Last month, the House of Representatives voted to approve the Equality Act. If passed, the bill would amend the Civil Rights Act to add sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity to its list of protected classes. The bill has broad implications on the rules for employment, housing, education, nonprofit groups that receive federal funds, and other areas.
Many Christian leaders have opposed the bill but say they support expanding federal protections against discrimination. One example is Shirley Hoogstra, the president of the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities. She told The Washington Post this week “I have come to see that LGBTQ people should have the same ease of movement about their lives. They shouldn’t run into unexpected, dignity-dismissing episodes.”
But Hoogstra and others are concerned that the Equality Act offers few protections for religious organizations and institutions that hold to traditional views of marriage and oppose things like gender reassignment surgeries
.In fact, the Equality Act specifically says that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, a federal law written to directly protect religious freedom, can’t be used to challenge the Equality Act’s rules on sexuality.
This week, as the bill went before the Senate Judiciary Committee, dozens of black Christian leaders published an open letter concerned that the bill would allow “LGBT rights to be used as a sword against faith institutions rather than a shield to protect the vulnerable.” Among the signers of that letter are the international religious freedom ambassador under the Obama administration, Suzan Johnson Cook and CT board member Claude Alexander.
Shirley Mullen is president of Houghton College and serves on the board of several Christian institutions, including the National Association of Evangelicals and the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities. For many years she was provost at Westmont College, and is a historian of philosophical thought, with doctorates in both history and philosophy.
Mullen joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the specifics of the Equality Act and outline what comes next for religious institutions holding to a traditional sexual ethic and loving their neighbor in a pluralistic democracy.
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Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder
The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola
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