Biden Planning ‘Swift’ Action on LGBT Agenda that Will Reverse Religious Liberty Protections
Joe Biden is “making sweeping promises” to LGBTQ activists and “proposing to carry out virtually every major proposal on their wish lists” upon inauguration, according to a new report.
The former vice president has long been a champion of LGBTQ causes and even endorsed same-sex marriage publicly before President Obama did. Now, weeks away from inauguration day, he is telling supporters he plans to roll back multiple Trump administration policies, including ones that impact religious liberty.
“Biden is making sweeping promises to LGBTQ activists, proposing to carry out virtually every major proposal on their wish lists,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend.
The changes, according to AP, include:
– Lifting restrictions on military service for transgender individuals.
– Creating “high-level LGBTQ-rights positions at the State Department, the National Security Council and other federal agencies.”
– Barring anti-LGBTQ discrimination by federal contractors.
– Reversing Trump administration policies that carve out religious exemptions in “social service agencies, health care providers, adoption and foster care agencies and other entities.”
– Pressuring public schools to allow transgender students access to the bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams that reflect their gender identity. The Trump administration had rescinded the Obama-era policy.
– Supporting a federal ban on conversion therapy for minors.
– Making the Equality Act a top legislative priority.
“Anti-equality forces are trying to use the framework of religious liberty to strip away individual rights,” Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, told AP.
A statement on the Biden campaign website says the Trump administration has gutted “protections for the LGBTQ+ community by carving out broad religious exemptions to existing nondiscrimination laws and policies across federal agencies.”
“Biden will reverse Trump’s policies misusing these broad exemptions and fight so that no one is turned away from a business or refused service by a government official just because of who they are or who they love,” the Biden website says.
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in October the Equality Act would be devastating for religious liberty.
“The fact is that this legislation is unquestionably radical, and it would bring about an immediate collision between religious liberty and the LGBTQ revolution, but in a whole new way, and with national legislation behind the momentum of the revolutionaries at the expense of religious liberty,” he said.
Related:
Biden Pledges Passage and ‘Full Enforcement’ of LGBT Equality Act in His First 100 Days
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Scott Olson/Staff
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
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