Tag Archives: ENDA

Commentary

Mitt Romney supports the anti-Christian and anti-business ENDA law

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This is an article from 2007 from the Christian post. I thought it might be a useful reminder of what Mitt Romney really believes when he’s not running for office.

Excerpt:

Romney during an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” said he supports the contentious Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which adds “sexual orientation” to a list of federally protected classes that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

The bill upsets conservative leaders because it grants special protection to employees based on their “actual or perceived” sexual orientation. Moreover, it would force Christian organizations that oppose homosexuality to hire gay employees.

“Mitt Romney’s Christmas present to the homosexual lobby disqualifies him as a pro-family leader,” said Peter LaBarbera, longtime pro-family advocate and founder of the Republicans For Family Values website.

“Laws that treat homosexuality as a civil rights are being used to promote homosexual ‘marriage,’ same-sex adoption and pro-homosexuality indoctrination of schoolchildren,” he said. “These same laws pose a direct threat to the freedom of faith-minded citizens and organizations to act on their religious belief that homosexual behavior is wrong.”

The former Massachusetts governor responded on “Meet the Press” that ENDA “makes sense” at the state level. But LaBarbera warns that if Romney “openly” promotes homosexual agenda at the state level then he cannot be trusted at the federal level.

He pointed out that the state’s “sexual orientation” nondiscrimination law laid the groundwork for Massachusetts legalizing gay “marriage” – the first in the country to do so.

Moreover, the ENDA-like law forced Boston’s Catholic Charities to shut down its century-old adoption agency because it refused to place children in gay households against Catholic teaching.

“Given Romney’s extensive pro-homosexual record and willingness now to depart from principle on this crucial issue, should we trust a ‘President Romney’ not to reverse course again on federal pro-homosexual laws such as ‘Hate Crimes’ and ENDA?” LaBarbera posed.

The Washington Times explains more about what it is exactly that Romney supports.

Excerpt:

 According to its leftist proponents, ENDA would merely insulate people who choose to engage in homosexual conduct (sexual orientation) or those who suffer from gender confusion (gender identity) against employment intolerance. In truth, however, this legislation effectively would codify the very thing it purports to combat: workplace discrimination.

ENDA would force – under penalty of law – Christian, Jewish or Muslim business owners to adopt a secular-humanist viewpoint, ignoring all matters surrounding sexual morality while making hiring and firing decisions. Unlike race or sex, homosexual and cross-dressing behaviors are both volitional and mutable. Nonetheless, and despite the reality that such conduct is in direct conflict with every major world religion, thousands of years of history and uncompromising human biology, ENDA would compel business owners with 15 or more employees to leave sincerely held religious beliefs at the workplace door and submit to the demands of the homosexual activist lobby.

This is government-sanctioned viewpoint discrimination. It is no different from forcing a deeply religious business owner to hire and accommodate an “out and proud” adulterous “swinger.” It directly alienates the unalienable rights of people of faith. It pits the government directly against the free exercise of religion and is, therefore, unconstitutional on its face.

During his second term, President George W. Bush issued a Statement of Administration Policy on ENDA, highlighting its unconstitutionality: “[ENDA] is inconsistent with the right to the free exercise of religion as codified by Congress in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).”

President Obama, however, has publicly endorsed the bill and promises to sign it into law should it pass. This is in perfect keeping with his demonstrated belief that the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers are more of a suggestion than a requirement. Mr. Obama has appointed at least one like-minded ENDA heavy. Chai R. Feldblum is a lesbian activist and sexual nihilist lawyer who in the past has publicly supported legalized polygamy and bisexual polyamory.

One of Mr. Obama’s recent 15 controversial recess appointments, Ms. Feldblum was sworn in on April 7 as a commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). As ENDA’s chief framer, Ms. Feldblum would be charged with its primary enforcement. This is the classic fox-guarding-the-henhouse scenario.

In the past, Ms. Feldblum has repeatedly and candidly summed up the mindset behind the bill. She has publicly stated that the battle between religious freedom and unfettered sexual license (aka homosexual “rights”) is a “zero-sum game,” meaning the two cannot possibly coexist in harmony. It’s a “winner takes all” approach.

When asked about the Christian business owner or religious organization that morally objects to hiring people openly engaged in the homosexual lifestyle, Ms. Feldblum snapped: “Gays win, Christians lose.” And where Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to religious liberty comes into conflict with the postmodern concept of homosexual “rights,” Ms. Feldblum has admitted having “a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.”

And Mitt Romney supported this in 2007.

News

Obama administration invents federal anti-bullying law

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From Minding the Campus. (H/T Hans Bader)

Excerpt:

There’s no federal law against bullying or homophobia.  So the Department of Education recently decided to invent one.  On October 26, it sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to the nation’s school districts arguing that many forms of homophobia and bullying violate federal laws against sexual harassment and discrimination.  But those laws only ban discrimination based on sex or race – not sexual orientation, or bullying in general.  The letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights twisted those laws, interpreting them so broadly as to cover not only bullying, but also a vast range of constitutionally protected speech, as well as conduct that the Supreme Court has held does not constitute harassment.  In so doing, it menaced academic freedom and student privacy rights, and thumbed its nose at the federal courts.

[…]The Education Department’s letter, from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, flouts the Supreme Court’s harassment definition, claiming that “Harassment does not have to . . . involve repeated incidents” to be actionable, but rather need only be “severe, pervasive, or persistent” enough to detract from a student’s educational benefits or activities.  The letter goes out of its way to emphasize that harassment includes speech, such as “graphic and written statements” and on the “Internet.”

The letter falsely implies that anti-gay harassment is generally discrimination based on sex.  It cites as an example of illegal “gender-based harassment” a case in which “a gay high school student was called names (including anti-gay slurs and sexual comments) both to his face and on social networking sites.”  This is exactly what most federal appeals courts have said does not constitute gender-based harassment.  It is not clear whether this case is merely a hypothetical example, or – more disturbingly — a finding by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in an actual case.  The letter says that “each of these hypothetical examples contains elements taken from actual cases.”

If it actually found a school district guilty of harassment over this, then the Education Department has flagrantly disregarded court rulings, not just about what harassment is, but about how officials are supposed to respond to harassment.  In this example of anti-gay harassment, the Education Department says the school district is liable for harassment even though “the school responded to complaints from the student by reprimanding the perpetrators,” which stopped “harassment by those individuals,” because such discipline “did not, however, stop others from undertaking similar harassment of the student.”

That totally contradicts the Supreme Court’s Davis decision, which said school districts are not liable for harassment just because it continues, and are only liable if they are “deliberately indifferent” to harassment once they learn of it; they need not actually succeed in “purging schools of actionable peer harassment” or ensuring that all “students conform their conduct to” rules against harassment.

Even in the workplace, where institutions are liable for mere “negligence” regarding harassment, they are not liable for harassment that continues after steps “reasonably calculated” to prevent harassment – such as when employees stubbornly engage in harassment for which other employees have already been properly disciplined, as a federal appeals court ruled in Adler v. Wal-Mart (1998).  Indeed, an institution may sometimes avoid liability even where there was no discipline at all, if it was unclear whether the accused employee was guilty, given due-process concerns.

Essentially, the Education Department has turned harassment law upside down, making schools more liable for harassment than employers, when the Supreme Court intended that they be less subject to liability.  (The Education Department letter also suggests racial “sensitivity” training – never mind that this often backfires on institutions.  In Fitzgerald v. Mountain States Tel & Tel. Co. (1995), where adverse employee reactions to diversity training spawned a discrimination lawsuit, the appeals court noted that “diversity training sessions generate conflict and emotion” and that “diversity training is perhaps a tyranny of virtue.”)

The letter also implies that it does not matter whether speech is “aimed at a specific target” in considering whether the speech is “harassment.”  This stretches harassment law well beyond its existing reach even in the workplace, effectively prohibiting a vast range of speech that a listener overhears and objects to.  Employees have tended to lose lawsuits alleging harassment over speech not aimed at them (the California Supreme Court’s 2006 Lyle decision being a classic example), although there are occasional exceptions to this rule.  The courts reason that “the impact of such ‘second-hand’ harassment is obviously not as great as harassment directed toward” the complainant herself.

Banning such speech also raises serious First Amendment issues.  Recently a federal appeals court cited the First Amendment in dismissing a racial harassment lawsuit by a university’s Hispanic employees against a white professor over his racially-charged  anti-immigration messages.   In its decision in Rodriguez v. Maricopa County Community College (2010), the court noted that the messages were not “directed at particular individuals” but rather aimed at “the college community” as a whole.

So the state has basically decided to use the government-run school system, which is funded through compulsory taxation, to potentially criminalize speech critical of certain Democrat special interest groups.

All sensible people are opposed to “bullying” and “harassment” – when someone hits someone else in a school or workplace, that should be stopped. Because schools are a place of learning, just as businesses are a place of working. But this administration is going beyond the punishment of actual crimes to punish thoughts that disagree with their their thoughts. This is just fascism – the imposition of moral values and beliefs by the state onto individuals through the use of threats, coercion and force. And you can bet that conservative groups – like the pro-life groups who are regularly banned from speaking – will not be the beneficiaries of these laws.

To learn more about Kevin Jennings, the man Obama has appointed to spearhead this efforts, read this post at Gateway Pundit. And this post at Gateway Pundit.

News

Business leaders blame Obama for high unemployment rate

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Story from Reuters about a recent jobs summit. (H/T American Spectator via ECM)

Excerpt:

At a recent symposium, Intel boss Paul Otellini, a contributor to both parties, expressed concern about the “amount of variability in the system” created by the state of policy flux in healthcare, energy and tax policy. “It is very difficult to make a hiring decision,” he said. General Electric chief executive Jeffery Immelt, a strong supporter of Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal, added he would just like to “know what the rules are.”

All in all, a disturbing replay of the 1930s when FDR’s big changes left business reeling with uncertainty and confusion. The “devil you don’t know” and all that.

Small business is certainly with Big Business on this, particularly regarding the mercurial nature of healthcare reform. The substance of ObamaCare continues to morph daily — from the state of the public option to employer mandates to financing expanded coverage – as Senate leader Harry Reid scrounges for votes. On energy, the president will make big promises at Copenhagen even though cap-and-trade looks stillborn in the Senate.

As for financial reform, Senate banking committee chair Chris Dodd has proposed sweeping changes, while the Tim Geithner-Barney Frank version in the House seems beamed in from a universe where the credit crisis never happened. Compromise could prove elusive. Even Obama’s tax reform panel has delayed releasing its findings.

The thing you have to understand about business is that finding and hiring an employee is an expensive process. If this employee has to be laid off later because of government increasing tax rates or regulations, then that layoff poisons the atmosphere in the entire company. If you want businesses to feel comfortable about hiring, you need to convince them that you aren’t going to raise their taxes or expenses, unionize their work force, fine them for hurting the environment, or pass laws that encourage their employees to sue them for being offended, etc.

Legislative initiatives like card-check, health care mandates, cap-and-trade, ENDA, increased government spending, tariffs, “pay equity” laws, restrictions on executive salaries, capital gains tax hikes, etc., make businesses very risk-averse about hiring decisions. If Obama wants to attack businesses, these businesses may just leave the USA and set up shop elsewhere. But more likely they will just stay here and avoid hiring any new employees until the 2012 election.