Action Alert: Senate Taking Up “SOGI” Bills Targeting People of Faith!
Today (January 29), the Senate General Laws Committee will hear and vote on a number of bills designed to take away our most fundamental freedoms by elevating the fluid concepts of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” (SOGI) to protected classes in every part of our state law. Wherever these measures are passed, it’s always people of deep faith who are specifically targeted, and watch as their businesses and reputations are torn down.
CLICK HERE now to urge your Senator to Vote NO on Senate Bills 66, 159, and 868!
SB 66 (D-McLellan) incorporates SOGI into VA’s housing laws, which will negatively impact religious colleges, churches, charities, and other institutions by forcing them to choose between violating their faith tenets or facing expensive lawsuits by “LGBTQ” activists. (Example: “Transgender files complaint against shelter for abused women”)
SB 159 (D-Boysko), in addition to adding SOGI to housing laws, would add SOGI to state employment. This will most certainly compel all state employees to speak words and messages they fundamentally disbelieve (and which are empirically untrue), such as “preferred gender” pronouns, or be fired if they don’t comply (It’s already happening: See The Firing of Peter Vlaming). It will also require biological men who self-identify as women to be given access to women’s bathrooms and changing rooms.
SB 868 (D-Ebbin) in one giant bill, incorporates SOGI as specially protected statuses in public and private employment, public accommodations, housing, appointments, credit, and the Virginia Human Rights Act. It also creates both civil and government-initiated causes of action to sue people claimed to be in violation.
You’re probably familiar with cake baker Jack Phillips in Colorado, florist Barronelle Stutzman in Washington, and other creative professionals who refused to lend their artistic talents to same-sex weddings in recent years.
Right here in Virginia, Brett and Alex Sandridge, owners of the wedding photography and videography business Gardenia Weddings, have become the latest victims of blatant intolerance. This married couple remained true to their beliefs, but faced immediate backlash after politely declining their services to a same-sex couple. (Read our blog “The Wedding Wars Come To Virginia”)
While non-discrimination laws based on one’s sexual orientation or gender identity may sound tolerant, the outcome is that they tend to result in intolerant applications that punish people of faith who have sincerely-held religious views on marriage and sexuality.
However, it is important to point out that there is not one piece of evidence that discrimination is actually taking place. In state government, according to the Virginia Department of Resource Management, there have been no cases of actual discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity beginning in 2009, when they began collecting data, through 2019. The only reason to introduce these bills is to empower the government to strong-arm people into abandoning their beliefs about marriage and sexuality.
These bills would give special powers to the state to punish those who hold a traditional view of marriage and human sexuality. It’s ever more important that you contact your Senator and tell them that you oppose policies which add fluid terms and categories into our anti-discrimination policies that will only target people of conscience.
CLICK HERE to urge your Senator to Oppose these dangerous policies that threaten our liberties!
