A handful of major LGBT civil rights groups are pulling their support from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund withdrew its support from the legislation, as did the American Civil Liberties Union; Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders; Lambda Legal; National Center for Lesbian Rights; and Transgender Law Center via a joint statement July 8. The issue is ENDA’s broad religious exemptions which alloww for legal loopholes to still discriminate on a federal, state and local level.
ENDA passed U.S. Senate last year, making it the first time federal lawmakers had bipartisan approval on legislation to advance gay rights since 2010.
“The morning after the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, we all woke up in a changed and intensified landscape of broad religious exemptions being used as an excuse to discriminate,” said Rea Carey, NGLTF executive director, in a press release. “We are deeply concerned that ENDA’s broad exemption will be used as a similar license to discriminate across the country. We are concerned that these types of legal loopholes could negatively impact other issues affecting LGBT people and their families including marriage, access to HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention and access to other reproductive health services. As one of the lead advocates on this bill for 20 years, we do not take this move lightly but we do take it unequivocally – we now oppose this version of ENDA because of its too-broad religious exemption. We cannot be complicit in writing such exemptions into federal law.”
In the joint statement on ACLU’s website, the LGBT civil rights groups stated:
“Given the types of workplace discrimination we see increasingly against LGBT people, together with the calls for greater permission to discriminate on religious grounds that followed immediately upon the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, it has become clear that the inclusion of this provision is no longer tenable. It would prevent ENDA from providing protections that LGBT people desperately need and would make very bad law with potential further negative effects. Therefore, we are announcing our withdrawal of support for the current version of ENDA.”
NGLTF, one of the nation’s oldest and largest national LGBT civil rights groups, wants legislation that protects LGBT people from discrimination with a less broad and more reasonable religious accommodation.
“The truth is that those who seek to deny full equality are succeeding by using religion to create a quasi-moral, completely legal mechanism to discriminate. We can’t let them succeed. We can’t let them ignore the vast majority of people — and millions of people of faith — who think that discrimination is completely immoral and should be completely illegal,” Carey said.
In the joint statement from ACLU and the other groups, they referenced the infamous Arizona SB 1062, which caused a national outcry for businesses allowing to discriminate solely based on religion.
“Our ask is a simple one: Do not give religiously affiliated employers a license to discriminate against LGBT people when they have no such right to discriminate based on race, sex, national origin, age, disability, or genetic information,” the statement read.
