The Equality Act Will Change Every Aspect Of American Life
On February 25, the House of Representatives, by a vote of 211 to 195, passed H.R. 5, the “Equality Act.”
Here is the official summary provided by the Congressional Research Service, in full:
Equality Act:
This bill prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in areas including public accommodations and facilities, education, federal funding, employment, housing, credit, and the jury system.
(In brief: very little of everyday life is left out.)
Specifically, the bill defines and includes sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity among the prohibited categories of discrimination or segregation.
Includes? Perhaps, but does not define. And it is hardly “specific”.
The bill expands the definition of public accommodations to include places or establishments that provide (1) exhibitions, recreation, exercise, amusement, gatherings, or displays; (2) goods, services, or programs; and (3) transportation services.
Don’t feel left out. You’ll be included soon.
The bill allows the Department of Justice to intervene in equal protection actions in federal court on account of sexual orientation or gender identity.
A lawyer’s dream, everyone else’s nightmare.
The bill prohibits an individual from being denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.
Of course, this particular is covered in the first paragraph. But it is repeated here for emphasis because the consequences of this provision will begin, in schools throughout the country, before the ink is dry at the White House signing ceremony.
We will examine the particulars of the bill after considering certain preambles necessary for analysis.
II.
First, on reality denied: philosopher Eric Voegelin has identified the powerful temptation to deny reality, an ideological tendency that has grown more prevalent in the past century. That denial was introduced by Karl Marx, who demanded that man not waste time understanding reality; “the point is,” he said, “is to change it” – more bluntly, to destroy it, in order to construct from the ruins a future world occupied by “Truly Socialist Man.”
The Equality Act indulges in that enterprise of denial by challenging the scientific, anthropological, religious, and cultural facts of reality regarding man and woman. Once these are denied, the bill pretends to create a new reality by legislative fiat.
Second, on the consequences of embracing an ideological “second reality”: the Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn witnessed first-hand the triumph of Marx’s programme as applied by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. That Party embraced a false vision of the nature of man and of reality in order to conform to the false tenets of the Communist ideology. The Party implemented that vision by the use of unprecedented terror and force.
In response, Solzhenitsyn observed that “the truth will make you free, but falsehood always brings violence in its wake.”
Third, how this law of cause and effect plays out: the violence identified by Solzhenitsyn can be wielded only by means of power. In order to implement its goals, H.R. 5 confers the power to enforce its provisions on the various branches of the Federal Government.
On that note, the warning of C.S. Lewis is helpful. “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”
Indeed, H.R. 5 confers on every individual the right to change the reality of their sexual nature, and, having done so, to call upon the Federal Government to “make other men” conform to their choice, by force if necessary.
Does that make all men equal?
Well, we will be told, some men are more equal than others.
We see above the ideological origin of the demand to alter reality; the success of a tyrannical regime in embracing it; the violent consequences of that embrace in history; and how the unlimited power to enforce that demand rests in the hands of the few who then use their power to impose their will on the rest of the population in the real world.
III.
With those preambles, we can raise certain questions regarding the particulars of H.R. 5.
The term “sexual orientation” appears thirty-nine times in the bill. Under “definitions,” we find that “The term `sexual orientation’ means homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality,” ignoring the several dozen other categories currently claimed by their respective adherents.
The term LGBTQ appears nine times, again without definition.
Most prevalent is the term “gender identity.” It appears in the bill sixty-one times. Under “definitions,” we find that “The term ‘gender identity’ means the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.”
Of course, that is no definition at all. At best, it is a description of random qualities that the bill’s authors dumped under “characteristics” and that term appears four times in the bill, again, without being defined.
Of course, the lack of definition is required to make possible the prosecution not only of actions but of “perceptions” and “beliefs”:
“The term ‘race,’ ‘color,’ ‘religion,’ ‘sex’ (including `sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’, or ‘national origin,’ used with respect to an individual, includes … (B) a perception or belief, even if inaccurate, concerning the race, color, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), economic status, or national origin, respectively, of the individual.”
The bill’s reach is as expansive as its terms are ambiguous and even contradictory.
Consider:
If it becomes law, the bill has onerous consequences for those whose perception – accurate or inaccurate – of a person’s “gender identity” might lead to unlawful discrimination. But that provision also applies to the individual allegedly discriminated against: that individual must perceive – accurately or inaccurately – in the mind of the discriminator a “perception” or “belief.” Of course, such a perception is impossible; and so the aggrieved individual must believe that such a “perception” or “belief” exists in the mind of the discriminator.
Hence, a case against an alleged violation of the Equality Act can be brought on the basis of what one person believes that another person believes.
Which is to say, if Person A believes that “God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them” (Gen. 5, 1-2), and he is “perceived” to have “discriminated” against Person B in any way, that perception suffices to make Person A in violation of the Equality Act per se.
And, speaking of “perception”: “gender identity” is also a matter of perception not only on the part of the transgressor, but also on the part of the individual who chooses to adopt a qualifying “gender identity.” Even though H.R.5 criticizes the “discredited practice known as ‘conversion therapy’,” the individual choosing one’s “gender identity” is free to amend that choice at will, converting his sexuality quite arbitrarily, without public notice, if the individual’s sexual whims change.
Should H.R. 5 be signed into law, one unavoidable consequence will be the explosion of lawsuits, court cases, administrative rulings, and constitutional challenges. One pivot point sure to be employed by the expanded law’s advocates is the Supreme Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992):
“Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt,” their plurality opinion reads – but Justice O’Connor, joined by Justices Kennedy and Souter, immediately insures that doubt will in fact abide and prosper. Here is their finding of fact:
“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
III.
Imprecision, ideology masquerading as settled law, unlimited breadth of application – all imposed by brute force. The devastation that the Equality Act will wreak is immeasurable.
Will minor children be allowed to choose “sex-change” surgery and drugs without parental knowledge or consent? Rachel Levine, the Biden Administration’s chief health official, refuses to answer. Will the age of consent regarding sex be reduced to twelve? Ten? Six? They sky’s the limit when it comes to “equality.”
That’s only one example; there are countless others. Employers, workers, medical professionals, families, women, and unborn children will be targeted. Religious institutions of all kinds and at every level will be attacked and disrupted, many of them closed down.
One need only observe the cost incurred by organizations like the Little Sisters of the Poor. To defend themselves against the HHS Contraceptive Mandate they were forced to spend untold millions of dollars on account of one federal regulation. The Equality Act will apply to every private and public action performed in “both private sector and Federal, State, and local government actors, including in employment, housing, and public accommodations, and in programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance.”
Nothing will be exempt. The Equality Act allows no hiding place from the Gender Thought Police.
IV.
Returning to our preambles, we see here the enshrinement of the right of every individual to define one’s own version of reality. But even fondly-held visions cannot escape the law of cause-and-effect. Over time, chaos will inevitably follow from that clash of visions. one vision alone will prevail.
At that point, society will prefer order – any order – to chaos. Then, the question will be , “whose vision shall rule?”
Humpty Dumpty has the answer:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master-that’s all.”
Time to Take Action
The Equality Act is a monstrosity and a lie. It flies in the face of our country’s founding principles that recognized with deep gratitude the God who created us equal in His sight.
To enjoy those rights, exercise them, and defend them, we must accept them on God’s terms – “Male and Female He created them.”
The House of Representatives has passed this bill as a payoff to powerful donor interest groups. The Senate will consider it next. If the Senate passes the legislation, the president has committed to signing it.
It is up to us to do everything we can – call our senators, tell our friends, write your local newspapers and call your local talk shows. They are attacking everything precious that we hold dear.
We have to raise the alarm like the patriots of old to defend our families, our Faith, and our freedom. We cannot allow the twisted supporters of this grotesque invasion of everything we hold dear to win – and if we fight, they won’t win!
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Second segment
Covid-19 Vaccines: Pro-life or No?
Katarina Carranco reports from PRI’s Rome Office
February 22, 2021
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Many in the pro-life movement are undecided whether to accept or reject the COVID-19 vaccine. But before we decide to make it, as a movement, a kind of pro-life litmus test, we must put the larger issue of abortion in context. N Truth be told, the COVID-19 vaccines are but one sad little link in a much bigger chain fettered to the great evil of our age: the killing of innocent children in the womb.
Those who say that the COVID-19 vaccines presently available are morally illicit point to the fact that the cell line used in their testing or production was derived from a baby aborted around 1960.
It is important to note that the vaccines currently available vary in their connection to abortion and thus their cooperation with that evil. The AstraZeneca vaccine used cell lines derived from abortion at all stages of the vaccine process (development, production and testing) and therefore has a strong connection to abortion. However, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were not developed or produced from cell lines derived from abortion but did make use of such cell lines (HEK-293) during the testing stages.
Both the Pontifical Academy of Life and the lay-run John Paul II Academy for Human Life and Family believe that this constitutes remote cooperation with evil, and should not be used as a basis for denying anyone the vaccine, especially the elderly who are at high risk from the China Virus.
But if an individual decides that receiving such a vaccine constitutes immoral cooperation with evil, then we — and society at large — should also reflect on all of our other choices in life that also constitute immoral cooperation with that same evil. The fact of the matter is that our society is so intertwined with the abortion culture and industry that it is almost impossible to not be “cooperating” with that evil in one way or another.
The fact is that the same 60-year-old cell lines used to develop the COVID-19 vaccine have not only been used in the making of other vaccines, but also in developing cancer treatments, insulin, and numerous commonly prescribed medicines and drugs, such as statins and blood pressure medications. The bottom line is that if the use of the currently available COVID vaccines is illicit because of their association with these cell lines, then the same use of these cells in the production of almost all of today’s medications makes their use equally illicit and we must therefore refuse them. Tens of millions of individuals would lose access to life-saving medications if we went down this path.
Those who claim that the use of COVID-19 vaccines can never be justified, to be consistent, must apply the same standard to all medicines that are associated with abortion. This would put the lives of countless people at immediate risk, and create an even bigger moral dilemma concerning human dignity than we are currently facing with the vaccine alone.
In a broader sense, we are all guilty of cooperation with the evil of abortion by nature of our society’s economic and cultural connection to it. For this reason, it is intellectually dishonest and inconsistent to deny vulnerable people who need immunization from COVID-19 access to the vaccines that are currently available, especially when there are no moral alternatives present. Perhaps one might suggest the use of hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin as effective therapeutics in the treatment of COVID-19, but it turns out that these drugs, too, are also tested using those same cell lines.
The average American has a much more proximate cooperation in the evil of abortion when they pay their taxes or buy anything made in China, where the government forces women to have abortions. And, now, under the Biden administration, we will be complicit in abortion when we simply pay our taxes. Remote cooperation, not just with abortion, but with all evil is inevitable unless we completely isolate ourselves from modern society by taking up a hermit-like existence.
This is not to say that individuals should not be free to abstain from a vaccine that has a connection to abortion, as long as by refusing it they do not cause harm to themselves or their community. And if there is no “clean vaccine” option — a vaccine that is not associated with abortion — then you should choose the vaccine that has the most remote cooperation with this evil. We should demand ethical practices in biomedical research — which means not using cell lines from aborted babies — and we should employ every lawful means to achieve this end. We should all educate ourselves using trustworthy sources of information so that we will know how to proceed.
All this is to say that the COVID-19 vaccines are only a small part of a much larger problem: the abortion-industrial-complex itself and the immoral practices of both bio-medical researchers and the pharmacological industry.
We urge everyone in the pro-life movement to confront the larger issues raised above. If we are to have an effective response to the unethical practices in the bio-medical and pharmacological industries we must be unified in our demands for clean vaccines and clean medicines. We must be courageous in our pursuit to seek the truth and defend life, but be realistic about the challenges as well. Above all, we must pray for clarity as we seek to expunge the sin of abortion from every corner of our lives and from society as a whole.
NOTE: Katarina Carranco is the Director of PRI’s newly established Rome Office.
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Third Segment
To Defend The Present, We Must Understand The Past
In tumultuous times, the endless flurry of events can distract us from the fundamentals of life. And some folks want it that way.
It’s no secret that malevolent forces rely on disorder, even chaos, as cover for their destructive schemes. When those forces find allies among the broader population, even enjoying the support of willing cooperators from the cultural elites, a nation’s bedrock principles can no longer be taken for granted. They must be defended at all costs – which means that they must first be understood.
It often seems that America’s enemies understand those principles better than her defenders do. “Know the enemy ,” said Sun Tzu. Leftists at home and abroad recognize well how America’s faith and our constitutional government are the twin targets that must be destroyed for tyranny to succeed. So destroy they must.
We have often remarked the contempt that Karl Marx had for philosophy. Philosophy has only interpreted the world, he wrote – “the point is, to change it.”[Theses on Feuerbach, XI]
Since Marx was a materialist, he targeted reality – all of it – for destruction. Truth, beauty, virtue, liberty – everything good must be destroyed.
That goal has been embraced by the Left ever since.
Curiously, Adolf Hitler resonated Marx’s demand for destruction. In Mein Kampf, Hitler demanded a “declaration of war against the existing order, the existing reality, the existing worldview.” [Mein Kampf, Vol II, Chapter 5]
That’s why the Left glories in calling Donald Trump “another Hitler”; the epithet has been carefully defined as irrefutable by generations of leftists who don’t want you to know that “Nazi” means “National Socialism.”
How did “Stalin” escape a similar fate? Oh, he was FDR’s good buddy, and that’s not part of what Stan Evans called “the liberal history lesson.”
Down the memory hole he goes.
And what about Joe Biden? Does his rule by decree make him “another Stalin”? It’s hardly worth the effort. Maybe “Dr. Jill” is “another Elena Ceaușescu, but her name’s probably too hard to pronounce, and she was shot on Christmas Day so the taunt would probably be “hate speech” anyway. No room for Elena in the Left’s cozy curriculum.
For the budding totalitarian, Karl Marx and Adolph Hitler are sound guides. They recognized that military victory alone does not deliver undisputed power. The entire social reality – its faith, its freedoms, its institutions – must be destroyed before they can be replaced by the revolutionary model.
Today’s leftists bent on destroying the United States understand that. That’s why they target for destruction our Constitutional protections of liberty – the Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Bill of Rights, our churches, and our borders, to name just a few. Those of us who defend our liberties must be “cancelled” – that is, deprived of our right to work, to speak the truth, to protect our families, neighbors, and communities
Indeed, our very language must be destroyed.
America was founded in slavery, insists the New York Times – so we must tear down those Jefferson statues, rename Washington Boulevard and John Adams High School.
Oppose us and you’re a White Supremacist!
Never mind that, once they win, they’ll enslave us all.
So what if two generations of students haven’t learned any history at all? They must be indoctrinated nonetheless, because George Orwell was right: “He who controls the present controls the past. And he who controls the past controls the future.”
And these folks want to control the future, very much.
A Vibrant Defense of America
In recent weeks much of what has come to pass in what we may loosely call “politics” is a farce. We can team up Hamlet and Liza Doolittle to deliver the verdict – “words, words, words.” While the poor players strut and fret their hour upon the stage, ‘tis better that we turn our attention to our homework. We have to sink our intellectual teeth into real meat, remember our roots, and dig into “the origin of certain truths without which the American founding would have been inconceivable.”
He masterfully answers the call to duty in his latest work, America On Trial: A Defense of the Founding [Ignatius Press; $27.95].
With vigor and clarity, Reilly traces “the lineage of the ideas that made the United States possible.” His work was inspired by the classic “We Hold These Truths,” in which John Courtney Murray, S.J., writes that our founders “thought the life of man and society under government is founded on truths, on a certain body of objective truth, universal in its import, accessible to the reason of man, definable, defensible. If this assertion is denied, the American proposition is, I think, eviscerated at one stroke.”
But where did these truths come from? “The story begins in classical philosophy and continues through history as the defense of nature, the good, and reason against the constant attacks of will, especially the will to power,” Reilly responds. The persuasive charm of his prose flows so easily that the reader might forget that she is reading a brilliant work of intellectual history, and more: a defense of that history against both those who would destroy it and those who consider it as an inadequate foundation, given the current pains suffered by our constitutional republic.
This accounts for Reilly’s extensive review of the historical sources of our liberties. He finds these in Israel, in Athens, and in Rome, and follows their development through the centuries, taking note of their defenders and their deformers. His treatment explains how the founding didn’t take place in a vacuum but within a rich and fascinating history inspired by God.
Our founding was based not on a couple of abstract documents, but on millennia of historical realities that inform and articulate every word, every phrase, every concept so dearly defended by our founders. All of them rest on the firm foundation of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” without which our independence and our liberties would have no defense at all.
Whence arose these truths? John Adams called them “the general Principles of Christianity” and “the general Principles of English and American Liberty.” Faith and freedom united to form the foundations of the unique American constitutional republic, and Reilly ably identifies the source of those principles that culminated in the founding of America the Beautiful.
Today’s scions of secularism will tremble at Reilly’s recounting of the principles of the Magna Carta of 1215 that flowed from centuries of Catholic Church canon law and practice. Augustine’s City of God proclaimed for all time the limits of political power, a truth that flourished in Christendom and nowhere else.
To put it simply, without God, there is no freedom. Ask any tyrant.
Like Marx and Hitler, today’s enemies of freedom recognize the Catholic Church and its timeless teachings as the ultimate enemy that must be destroyed. Augustine identified for all time the enemies of the City of God as those who love power – unlimited power – for its own sake.
Reading Reilly, one appreciates all the more why we must defeat them.
