Imagine a World Without Religious Freedom

Imagine, if you can, a nation where the President can reject the entry of the Pope or any religious leader who opposes same-sex marriage.  That sounds chilling, right?  Democrats are working on a bill to do just that.

The Global Respect Act, introduced in the House (HR 3485) by Democrat David Cicilline of RI with 73 Democrat cosponsors and one Republican – Brian Fitzpatrick of PA, passed the House on February 9, 2022, with the help of 6 RINOS. It now sits in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

While the bill’s main purpose, according to sponsors, is to protect LGBTQ individuals living abroad, the ambiguous language contained in this bill leaves the door open to imposing Visa restrictions on individuals for their deeply held religious beliefs.  It is a part of the left’s ongoing campaign to commit the US to advance gender ideology, deprioritizing religious freedom and free speech.  It risks undermining the foundations of the human rights system by violating the rights of anyone who adheres to not only traditional religious teachings but has health concerns about the homosexual lifestyle or expresses disproval of transgender ideology.

It fits right in with the agenda of those international left-wing voices calling for the criminalization of speech that doesn’t align with the left’s ideological-purity tests for how to talk about families, human biology, or sexual morality. 

In a world where even “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling can be attacked for observing the potential for gender ideology to hurt women, it is not a stretch to imagine that the legislation’s undefined terms, such as “complicity,” “inciting,” and “cruel” or “degrading” treatment, could be applied to pastors, rabbis, or imams preaching against what their faiths consider to be sexual sins or, against a concerned parent trying to protect their child from a school’s or medical authorities’ attempt to “transition” them from his or her biological sex.

Many people, Biden and Pelosi foremost among them, link the Global Respect Act explicitly with the Equality Act, a bill which would apply to people living in the United States.

As Religious Freedom Institute President Tom Farr points out, this bill “would add sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) to classes protected under the Civil Rights Act and would inevitably suppress traditional religious convictions on sexuality, marriage, human nature and human dignity, as well as expose persons or groups holding these beliefs to lawsuits and financial ruin. The law will mark them — like racists — as ‘hateful’ and ‘bigoted.’”

The LGBTQ community makes up slightly more than 7% of the U.S. population. Over half of this group are registered Democrats. Those who identify as LGBTQ are invariably liberal. It’s not surprising that every U.S. House Democrat voted for this bill.

We need to preserve everyone’s fundamental freedoms. One indispensable way to do that is to uphold religious freedom for all. The Global Respect Act would do just the opposite. The Senate should vote it down.

Global Respect Act Disrespects Religious Liberty, Free Speech Rights by Grace Melton, CNS News; Congress Should Respect Human Rights; The ‘Global Respect Act’ Doesn’t by Arielle Del Turco, Family Research Council; Congress Should Respect Human Rights by Rejecting HR 3485, by Grace Melton, the Heritage Foundation; The Anything But Equality Act by Franklin County VA Patriots.

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