Family Research Council: ‘No Compromise’ on Equality Act

Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins said Fox News’ story suggesting faith groups met with staff members of several Republican senators in order to craft a “compromise” on the Democrats’ Equality Act is misleading.

“Discussing the myriad of threats contained in the Equality Act w. Senate staff isn’t the equivalent of crafting a compromise bill,” Perkins wrote in a tweet Saturday. “There can be NO COMPROMISE on the 1st Amendment. It is for every American & cannot be limited to religious orgs or churches.”

“The Equality Act contains threats to life, family, AND religious freedom,” Perkins added. “There is no way to fix this horrible bill.”

Fox News reported “sources” said staff from the offices of Republican Sens. Thom Tillis (NC), Rob Portman (OH), and Susan Collins (ME) met with representatives of FRC, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Concerned Women for America, and American Principles Project “to ask for their help in crafting a bill similar to the controversial Equality Act, but one that includes protections for religious groups.”

The report continued:

One source familiar with the approximately 2-hour meeting said that groups were asked to come up with “guiding principles” for a bill that would include the discrimination protections of the Equality Act while including guardrails to protect religious groups.

Another source told Fox that there are weekly working groups underway ahead of another meeting with the senators’ offices later this month, and the plan is to come up with principles that most can agree upon.

“The senators wanted to do something, but they wanted a suitable alternative to The Equality Act,” the source said.

House Democrats have already passed the Equality Act, claiming it will merely amend federal civil rights law to ensure sexual orientation and gender identity are protected classes, even though the Constitution already provides protection for the rights of all American citizens, regardless of their “identity group.”

The bill faces greater uncertainty in the Senate, and the Fox News story stated “a compromise with stronger religious protections might get support” among Republican senators.

If enacted, however, the Equality Act would have a major impact on children and their parents, potentially upending the culture as American families now know it. Lawsuits filed against Americans who adhere to the science of biological sex and the First Amendment rights of citizens would now have a federal law backing them up that asserts gender identity supersedes biological sex.

Breitbart News identified some of the Equality Acts’ radical features:

1. The bill would end the federal legal recognition of complementary male and female sex in favor of gender identity.
2. The bill would eliminate the traditional right to privacy of women and girls in public facilities, in favor, instead, of gender identity.
3. The Equality Act would eviscerate women’s and girls’ sports.
4. The Equality Act would be used to mandate school curricula that affirm and promote sexual orientation and gender identity views.
5. The Equality Act would be used to remove custody rights from parents who refuse to have their minor children undergo transgender medical interventions and procedures.
6. Since the Equality Act exempts itself from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, religious schools, hospitals, and adoption agencies could face federal sanctions for upholding their teachings with regard to life, sexuality, and marriage under the legislation.
7. The Equality Act’s text that names a form of “discrimination on the basis of pregnancy” would be used to punish healthcare providers who refuse to perform an abortion or to outlaw policies that ban funding for the procedure.

Ryan Anderson, president of Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) tweeted in February:

The USCCB said in a statement on its website about the measure:

The Equality Act purports to protect people experiencing same-sex attraction or gender discordance from unjust discrimination. Although this is a worthy purpose, the Equality Act does not serve it. And instead of respecting differences in beliefs about marriage and sexuality, the Equality Act discriminates against people of faith precisely because of those beliefs.  In the process, the Equality Act codifies the new ideology of “gender” in federal law, dismissing sexual difference and falsely presenting “gender” as only a social construct.

“The point of this maneuver is obvious: to fool the religious Americans who largely vote Republican into continuing to do so while Republicans actively undermine their interests and the Constitution,” Joy Pullmann, executive editor at the Federalist, wrote Monday.

“Pretending a ‘compromise’ is possible here is a fool’s errand in more ways than one,” she added. “Fundamentally, it’s foolish because it’s not possible to both uphold the U.S. Constitution and the identity politics regime.”

Breitbart News reached out to the offices of Sens. Collins, Portman, and Tillis for comment and is awaiting a response.