We [transgenders] are considered a threat — a threat to what, I will never understand. Don’t tell me it’s about individual beliefs. When I worked as a health care provider, I never denied Christians care, even though their religion has been weaponized against me. How is a doctor refusing me care when I am sick square with Christian values? What ideology was protected during the nights I spent on the street, knowing that I would be denied shelter?
The religious liberty objection to the Equality Act should be dismissed — with contempt. The issue was litigated during the ’60s, during the Civil Rights movement, when southerners argued that their religious freedom entitled them to deny blacks access to restaurants and lodging because they bear the Mark of Cain (sometimes, Ham). The Supreme Court rejected the argument, and more than once.
Basically, you can discriminate in private spaces — your home, your church — but not in public spaces such as restaurants. You can keep blacks, gays, Scientologists our of your home if you wish, but not out of your restaurant; if you hang a sign offering hot dogs for sale, you’ve got to sell hot dogs to anybody willing and able to pay.
I occasionally wonder why this argument keeps going around? Nobody my age has any good excuse for falling for it, and so I wonder if the difficulty lies in some perceived difference between our race-struggles and sex-related struggles. Everybody agrees, for instance, that skin color is innate; you are however you are born. But sexual differences aren’t so obviously innate. Is that the difficulty, innate out-of-sight traits that are too-easily dismissed as sin or cussedness or perversity? That would explain the persistence of conversion therapy, I suppose.