LGBT Groups Pull Support For ENDA In Wake Of Hobby Lobby Ruling

Customers are seen at a Hobby Lobby store in Denver on Wednesday, May 22, 2013. A challenge to the federal health care law faces its most prominent test yet in a full 10th Circuit hearing in Denver on Thursday. Hobb... Customers are seen at a Hobby Lobby store in Denver on Wednesday, May 22, 2013. A challenge to the federal health care law faces its most prominent test yet in a full 10th Circuit hearing in Denver on Thursday. Hobby Lobby stores is challenging a federal mandate requiring it to offer employees health coverage that includes access to the morining-after birth control pill. The Oklahoma based arts and crafts chain says the mandate violates the religious beliefs of its owners. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski) MORE LESS
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After the the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force dropped its support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act over concerns the Hobby Lobby decision opened a door to abuse of the bill’s religious exemption on Tuesday, additional equality groups followed suit.

The American Civil Liberties Union announced on Tuesday that it would pull its support as it is currently written, along with the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Transgender Law Center.

The groups cite concerns over the broad religious exemption included in the bill passed by the Senate in November. They worry that it could be used for companies to continue to discriminate against LGBT people due to religious beliefs, especially considering the exemption the Supreme Court allowed in its Hobby Lobby decision.

“Given the types of workplace discrimination we see increasingly against LGBT people, together with the calls for greater permission to discriminate on religious grounds that followed immediately upon the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, it has become clear that the inclusion of this provision is no longer tenable,” the ACLU said in a statement. “It would prevent ENDA from providing protections that LGBT people desperately need and would make very bad law with potential further negative effects.”

The ACLU had already been pushing to limit the religious exemption in the bill.

The Human Rights Campaign said on Tuesday that it will still support the legislation.

“HRC supports ENDA because it will provide essential workplace protections to millions of LGBT people,” spokesperson Fred Sainz told TPM in an email.

When asked by TPM if the National Center for Transgender Equality would pull its support for the bill, the group did not back away from the legislation, but said they will push for a narrowed exemption.

“The National Center for Transgender Equality is deeply concerned with the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling and the possibility that this decision could be grounds for further expanding religious exemptions. We believe that this ruling, though mistaken and harmful, is limited and should remain so,” the group’s director of policy, Harper Jean Tobin, Told TPM. “Regardless, NCTE has long pressed to narrow ENDA’s overbroad religious exemption, and will continue to vigorously oppose any attempt to cloak discrimination of any sort under the guise of faith. That is contrary America’s values, including our tradition of religious freedom.”

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  1. First: “National Gay and Lesbian Task Force” sounds like a particularly fabulous special forces unit.

    Second: In this political environment, in which the Republicans are absolutely not going to pass any bill protecting anyone from workplace discrimination, it makes perfect sense to stake out a hard-line position. Concessions are for negotiations that might actually get somewhere, and we’re not anywhere near that point.

  2. Agreed. Nothing to gain at this point by appearing open to having people discriminate against others.

    At this point, it seems fairly likely that we will see Justice Kennedy authoring an opinion pretty much making any efforts to discriminate against gays and lesbians be subject to strict scrutiny, which will obviate the need for the bill anyway. He’s practically on the verge of it after the DOMA decision.

  3. Avatar for Libs Libs says:

    Nobody should be compelled to go against their religious believes by forcing them on providing assistance, direct or indirect, in what they see as terminating a life. That should and is protected as SCOTUS has ruled. At the same time religious believes cannot be invoked by the very some people on someone else lifestyle, lifestyle that is not a choice but an imposition by nature itself. If it’s true that God created this world and living beings on it, it’s also true that LGBT people were none the less created by God. And as His creatures they must be respected, protected and not discriminated against.

  4. Avatar for ajm ajm says:

    Why do you see employers who pay their workers as being forced to provide assistance, direct or indirect, in what they see as terminating a life? Is there any moral distinction depending on whether that pay is in the form of money or in the form of insurance.

    All the supreme court did was allow the boss to hinder the religious right of the workers to make their own decisions.

  5. Hobby Lobby, Alito’s greatest poison pill.

Continue the discussion at forums.talkingpointsmemo.com

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