AOC Says Religious Liberty Advocates Are ‘Weaponizing Scripture’ to ‘Justify Bigotry’ against LGBTQ Community
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-D) said religious liberty advocates and the Trump administration are “weaponizing and abusing Scripture to justify bigotry,” according to the Washington Examiner.
In a House Oversight Committee hearing to discuss LGBTQ rights, Ocasio-Cortez called out those who use Scripture to take away rights from gay people. She also compared religious freedom advocates to white supremacists.
“It’s very difficult to sit here and listen to arguments in the long history of this country of using Scripture and weaponizing and abusing Scripture to justify bigotry,” she said. “White supremacists have done it. Those who justified slavery did it. Those who fought against integration did it, and we’re seeing it today.
“I feel as though if Christ himself walked through those doors and said what he said thousands of years ago, when he said we should love our neighbor and our enemy—that we should welcome the stranger, fight for the least of us, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven—he would be maligned as a radical and rejected from these doors,” she said.
The Catholic freshman congresswoman continued her three-minute speech by declaring her belief that all people are holy and sacred.
“There is nothing holy about rejecting medical care of people, no matter who they are, on the grounds of what their identity is,” she said. “There is nothing holy about turning someone away from a hospital. There is nothing holy about rejecting a child from a family. There is nothing holy about writing discrimination into the law.”
The committee discussed several of the new regulations made against LGBTQ people since Trump began his administration. These include allowing religious-based adoption and foster care agencies to turn away gay or transgender couples from children; banning transgender people from the military; and, rolling back several federal protections made by the Obama administration for gay and transgendered people.
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Alex Wroblewski/Stringer
Mikaela Mathews is a freelance writer and editor based in Dallas, TX. She was the editor of a local magazine and a contributing writer for the Galveston Daily News and Spirit Magazine. She blogs at mikaelamathews.com.
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