A column which appeared last week in The Graham Star
(“The Equality Attack”) denigrated H.R. 5, The Equality Act.
The critique began with blaming the Democrats for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That is political, partisan and grossly inaccurate. In fact, the Senate Republicans were in favor 27-6 and the House Republicans were in favor 136-35. The statement “in every line you will find a direct correlation between women and the LGBTQ group” can only be made by someone with chauvinistic views of women bordering on misogyny. Women are not given a “high honor of being wives, mothers and co-laborers.” Being wives and mothers is a matter of choice, and perhaps that “co-laborer” wants to be a supervisor – or maybe even a boss – someday.
Another portion of the column, which reads, “The Equality Act is an attack on the created order,” fails to acknowledge how demagogues abuse and co-opt well-meaning concepts. Just like the ancients sought to understand the inexplicable by creating characteristics for the constellations, the original advocates of created order tried to make sense of life by prioritizing family, church, state and the economy. The concept originated in Germany in the 1700’s by religious philosophers and was 230 years later used by the Nazis, to justify Aryan superiority leading to the Holocaust. Homosexual males were made to wear inverted, pink triangles on their sleeves and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They underwent horrible tortures too vile to mention in this column.
The Equality Act does add protections for disabled workers and no longer requires that transgender people must be undergoing a medical procedure to be protected. The Amendment expands protection against harassment and violence, reaffirms the equal protections of the 14th Amendment and makes sure that women don’t have to pay more for products and services that are similar to products and services used by men.
The column is unnecessarily hurtful to the LGBTQ community. It ignores the contribution to the arts, medicine, faith, economy, entertainment, military, politics and sports made by members of the LGBTQ community. To turn this into a learning experience, let’s consider Coach Vince Lombardi’s wisdom, as seen in an advertisement appearing last week. “People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.”
Roger Carlton writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star.