A new law would withhold funds from Christian schools that don’t toe the leftist line on ‘gender identity.’
A first-of-its-kind anti-religious-liberty bill is being considered in the California Senate.
Tacked onto existing law, the proposed amendment to the state’s Equity in Higher Education Act attempts to stigmatize and coercively punish any religious belief system that offers a difference of opinion about sexuality and gender.
The bill strong-arms religious schools into an untenable position: Either compromise their religious identity or risk losing access to grants and government-backed financial assistance.
According to the legislation, any religious school that made admission decisions or laid out student-conduct expectations based on religious criteria that were at odds with the bill’s protected classes would risk losing access to state funds unless they affirmed the highly contestable categories of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” – categories at odds with views about marriage and sexuality in many religious traditions.
As Andrew Walker, writing in National Review pointed out, this amendment attempts to fix a non-existent problem. Students who apply and attend colleges do so voluntarily.
He adds the next wave of the sexual-revolutionary agenda is to bring all dissenting institutions into conformity with progressive orthodoxy and this bill is designed to do exactly that.