Stephen Broden: The Equality Act Will Nullify the Religious Freedom Restoration Act

The First Amendment to the Constitution provides security and protection for religious liberty in our nation. The Equality Act will modify and encroach upon those protections and render our religious freedoms subordinate to the lifestyle choices of the LGBTQ community.

We strongly encourage you to stop this bill from consideration in the Senate. As pastors and members of the black evangelical community, we have observed that the law will have a deleterious impact on all religious communities in our nation in the following ways.

The Equality Act will:

• • • Criminalize Christian preaching and counseling that calls LGBTQ behavior sin.
    • Provide federal protection for men to use women’s showers and bathrooms.
    • End women’s sports as biological men will have federal law protecting their new right to compete as women. Title 9 will end as we know it.
    • Force churches to perform LGBTQ weddings.
    • Force children to learn about destructive LGBTQ behavior in public schools as normative and even supreme over heterosexuality.

The Equality Act in Section 1107 seeks explicitly to nullify the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.” It specifically says:

“The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (42 U.S.C. 2000bb et seq.) shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.”

The Equality Act will cause great consternation and resistance from all religious communities across the nation. Stop The Equality Act.

Atop this burlesque and demimondaine agenda to ruin our society, these mendacious architects of our national death have malevolently pulled the race card from the bottom of the deck in a parasitic maneuver to conflate crassly amoral and immoral “Johnny come lately” sexual identities as being identical and integral to the Civil Rights Movement and Blacks whose ancestors were chattel slaves, segregated, enserfed, and wholly marginalized on account of their immutable trait of skin color and African-Indigenous blood. Senator, the “sodonormative” logic used by the Radical Homosexual Liberation Movement falsely asserts that “Gay is the new Black.” We collectively chafe when the biblically-forbidden sexual practices of individuals are equated to who we are as a race of people. This scam of the immoral Left is both fascistic and racist and it wickedly harnesses the struggle of Black Americans to become fully-fledged Americans with people who have unnatural sexual lusts. If you do not prevent the passage of the Gay Equality Act in the Senate, you will have fulfilled Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictional character Simon Legree’s dream of forever holding Blacks in abject slavery and submission to America’s original sin of slavery. Therefore, on behalf of scores of millions of Black Americans of all faiths and walks of life, we implore that you, herewith, deploy all your vast parliamentarian skills to prevent this egregious and morally bankrupt legislation from being put on the floor of the Senate for a vote — for all Americans.

We respectfully request a meeting with you concerning these profoundly important issues.

Pastor S.E. Broden and Dr. Randy Short

Stephen E. Broden is the senior pastor at Fair Park Bible Fellowship, founder of Protect Life and Marriage Texas, and member of the National Black Prolife Coalition. He is the chairman of the Gone 2 Far Movement. Dr. Randy Short co-authored this article.

The views expressed in opinion articles are solely those of the author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by Black Community News.