Sen. Warren Slams Republican Plot To Legalize Taxpayer-Funded Discrimination Against LGBT Community (TWEETS)
Today, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform took up the “First Amendment Defense Act” (FADA). In typical Republican fashion, FADA is a shameless attempt to re-institutionalize religious sexual repression across the country, making it legal to discriminate against anyone in a same-sex marriage or even having premarital sex. It’s a rehashing of the ridiculous “religious liberty” argument used to unsuccessfuly justify anti-LGBT discrimination laws – but on a national level.
Under this bill, which the Taliban would applaud, any taxpayer-funded entity — businesses, schools, hospitals, a post office – could ignore laws that conflict with their religious beliefs about marriage. As the Huffington Post notes: “that means a government contractor, for example, could fire an employee for being in a same-sex marriage. A drug treatment facility could turn away people for being LGBT. A federal employee could refuse to provide services, including veterans’ or Social Security benefits, to a surviving member of a same-sex married couple.”
Coming just weeks after fifty LGBT Americans were brutally murdered at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, it appears that all the thoughts and prayers of conservatives were lies – or else they wouldn’t be fighting so hard to legalize hate. House Republicans would rather waste even more taxpayer time and money arguing over how we can further ostracize and marginalize LGBT Americans to fit their draconian conceptions of gender, sexuality, and marriage that are no longer relevant in a multi-ethnic, multi-gendered, and religiously pluralist society.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MASS) took to Twitter today to express her outrage at the bill in a passionate storm of righteous condemnations.
Our country has seen too many tragedies this month. So what are the @HouseGOP doing right now? Holding a hearing to legalize hate.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 12, 2016
I’m not joking: @HouseGOP are holding a hearing right now about making it easier for people to discriminate against #LGBT Americans.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 12, 2016
Marriage equality is the law of the land. But #LGBT Americans still lack federal protections against discrimination they desperately need.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 12, 2016
The GOP #FADA bill could let hospitals, government workers, employers, & even landlords discriminate against married same-sex couples.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 12, 2016
The @HouseGOP should be ashamed. The last thing Congress should be doing is giving homophobic Americans a license to discriminate.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 12, 2016
Leave it to the religious right to combine a cheap political shot, discrimination, and moralization of conservative Christianity into a legislative suicide bomb that will obviously never stand up in federal court and has absolutely no chance of becoming law. In the wake of the volatile emotional tensions gripping the nation as the divide between right and left, between fear and hope, between ignorance and knowledge, between hatred and love grows ever deeper, it is appalling to see the sell-vote “legislators” in the House wasting our time with their superiority complex. They seem to have an obsessive need to prove to us that their religion is superior to all others, and to impose their perverse and oppressive interpretation of its tenets on an unwilling population while spitting in the face of Lady Liberty and the values of tolerance and pluralism that our nation was founded on.
