Northam Signs Bill Targeting Churches and Religious Schools

On Saturday of Holy weekend, Governor Northam signed into law SB 868 (D-Ebbin), a bill that weaponizes the Attorney General and agitating “LGBTQ” activists to target Virginia businesses, private schools, religious nonprofits, and even churches who continue to maintain their long-standing convictions about marriage, gender, and sexuality.

As some other states have done, this law adds the fluid and subjective concepts of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as specially protected categories in virtually every part of our state Code, but most significantly in the Human Rights Act, which now applies to “all places of public accommodation” (broadly defined, and would include most churches, schools, and religious ministries) as well as all private employment practices for entities with more than five employees (with religious organizations apparently not able to hold their employees to their core faith tenets).

We’ve told you so much about this fight over the past few months. Thousands of you reached out to your legislators and the Governor though emails, letters, petitions, calls, and personal meetings to urge them – at the very least – to ensure adequate protections for faith-based entities like churches and religious schools. Dozens of pastors, ministry leaders, and Christian school presidents from across the state showed up at the Capitol – more than once, and for many hours – to lobby their legislators and testify before committees. The outpouring from our side was truly remarkable.

Yet in the end, despite every conceivable effort on our part and yours, both the Democrat-controlled legislature and Governor Northam disregarded even our most modest requests to safeguard fundamental religious liberties.

The situation is particularly serious in light of the new potentially crushing financial penalties that come with a violation, including hefty fines (up to $50K for first offence and up to $100K for each subsequent offense), unlimited compensatory damage awards (including emotional distress), up to $350K in punitive damages, and then adding insult to injury, the court can make the defendant pay their accuser’s attorneys fees, in addition to its own. To better understand just how dramatic this will change things in Virginia, check out this recent article.

We can be certain of one thing from all of this: Lawsuits are coming.

And in case there was any room to doubt that, recall that along the way some legislators didn’t even try to hide their animus towards religious groups with traditional views. As we noted with one Delegate in particular, many of our gravest concerns for religious freedom were emphatically confirmed by the bold and consistent statements of those pushing for the bill, which made very clear their intent to curtail the religious exercise of even overtly religious organizations. (It’s worth looking back at our “Simon Says” series here, here, and here to see.)

As I recently told Channel 6 News and other outlets, in his dissent to the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision inventing a right to marriage, Justice Alito warned that some would use that decision to “stamp out every vestige of dissent.” It took the Virginia General Assembly less than five years to pass legislation that empowers our own Attorney General and endless social activists to do just that – or to try, at least.

Unfortunately, this means that every business owner, church, or religious organization that continues to operate in their practices and facilities according to traditional, historical, biological, or orthodox religious viewpoints about men and women could find themselves on the wrong side of the heavy hand of government.  

And that is one of the reasons why The Family Foundation is already preparing to defend Virginians who are attacked for their faith and conscience. We see the storm clouds gathering and quickly approaching, and while we can now no longer hold off this storm – as we have successfully helped to do for many years – we are committed more than ever to doing what we can to become as an “umbrella” to faith-minded Virginians to hopefully shield them from its effects. We look forward to telling you more about this in the coming months.

We are also planning to host a live webinar on these issues for pastors, business owners, and other faith leaders in the coming weeks to address many of the questions being raised.

At the end of all our efforts together, both to uphold in the law our Creator’s design for men and women and to protect people of faith who continue doing so, I am reminded of this encouraging Scripture verse:

“As for you, what you intended against me for evil, God intended for good, in order to accomplish a day like this—to preserve the lives of many people.” – Genesis 50:20

Even as we grieve the unnecessary but now inevitable storm these laws have set into motion, we are nevertheless excited about what comes next because we know that it is in times like these that our God does some of His most incredible works in our midst.