The Supreme Court decision set off a debate between religious liberty and sexual-orientation nondiscrimination that advocates fear could undo years of progress.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/how-hobby-lobby-split-the-left-and-set-back-gay-rights/374721/
In the Hobby Lobby decision handed down last month, the Supreme Court was asked to strike a balance between women’s rights and religious freedom. But the major conflict that has erupted in the wake of that decision has been between religious freedom and gay rights. The resulting controversy has split gay-rights and faith groups on the left, with wide-ranging political fallout that some now fear could hurt both causes.
One chapter of the controversy is set to close on Monday, when President Obama plans to sign a long-awaited executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against gays and lesbians, according to a White House official. But the debate that began over that order’s provisions for religious nonprofits has spilled over into a broader conflict. Many prominent gay-rights groups have now withdrawn their support from a top legislative priority, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, over the religious exemption it contains.
“The religious exemption debate has now been polarized to the point where people are saying, ‘All or nothing,’” said Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, director of social policy for the center-left think tank Third Way, whose research and activism on gay marriage have been instrumental to that cause’s mainstream acceptance. “The narrative that’s now beginning to form is that Democrats are against religion. It’s not true, and it’s very dangerous.”
The order Obama is to sign Monday seeks a middle ground. It maintains the narrow exemption already in federal law, which states that religious groups that contract with the government can make religion a condition of hiring. Some gay-rights and civil-liberties advocates had called on Obama to eliminate that provision. But the new order will not include a broader religious exemption that would allow nonprofit contractors to refuse employment to gays if they viewed it as inconsistent with their faith. Some progressive faith leaders had asked Obama to include such an exemption. "The president, and the American people, firmly believe that all Americans deserve to be treated with dignity and respect in the workforce," the White House official said Friday.
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Hobby Lobby’s antigay lawyer is about to be rewarded with a lifetime appointment as a federal judge
His record of attacking women's rights is well documented, but Duncan's record on LGBT issues is particularly nightmarish.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2018/04/hobby-lobbys-antigay-lawyer-rewarded-lifetime-appointment-federal-judge/
The Trump Bench: Kyle Duncan
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/the-trump-bench-kyle-duncan-the-fifth-circuit.html
Donald Trump’s most enduring legacy will be his judges. Who are they?
Age: 47
The Decision: Duncan cut his teeth defending policies that discriminate against transgender schoolchildren. He seemed to draw upon that experience in a transphobic opinion issued last Wednesday.
That opinion, U.S. v. Varner, involved a transgender inmate’s modest request to change her name on several court documents. These documents identified her as Norman Keith Varner, but she has since transitioned and legally changed her name to Kathrine Nicole Jett. Without the aid of an attorney, Jett asked the 5th Circuit to order a revision of these old court documents to reflect her new name and true gender identity. “I am a woman and not referring to me as such leads me to feel that I am being discriminated against based on my gender identity,” she wrote. “I am a woman—can I not be referred to as one?”
In a 2–1 decision, Duncan denied both of Jett’s requests. He first refused to revise her name on court documents on technical grounds, finding no authorization under federal law to consider the motion. Then he embarked upon a five-page screed that willfully misinterpreted Jett’s entreaty to be “referred to as” a woman. Duncan claimed that Jett demanded an order forcing the lower court and the government to use female pronouns under threat of contempt. (In reality, as Judge James L. Dennis explained in dissent, Jett had merely asked 5th Circuit to respect her gender identity by using the correct pronouns.)
Duncan did acknowledge that judges have discretion to use the right pronouns, but refused to do so here, for the most trollish of reasons. He wrote that federal courts must sometimes decide “hotly-debated issues of sex and gender identity,” and that using a transgender litigant’s preferred pronoun may “unintentionally convey” a judge’s “tacit approval of the litigant’s underlying legal position.” The Code of Conduct compels judges to maintain “the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary,” Duncan noted, and using preferred pronouns could indicate “bias” toward transgender people.
As legal analyst Cristian Farias
has pointed out, that same code also compels judges to be “patient, dignified, respectful, and courteous to litigants.” Duncan simply ignored that rule. Moreover, as
Vox’s Ian Millhiser wrote, Duncan does not actually maintain impartiality by using the wrong gender pronouns. He reveals that he has taken a side against transgender litigants.
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The Largest Christian Charity in America Gives Millions to Anti-LGBT Hate Groups
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/03/20/the-largest-christian-charity-in-america-gives-millions-to-anti-lgbt-hate-groups/
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By far the biggest recipient of NCF donations is Alliance Defending Freedom, a large network of Christian extremist lawyers who have supported criminalizing homosexuality, sterilizing transgender people, and claimed that gay men are pedophiles. The group recently came out against congressional Democrats’ Equality Act, which would ban discrimination against LGBTQ Americans. ADF received nearly $50 million of NCF’s donations over those three years — approximately a third of its total income.
But that brings us back to a different question: If all these groups receive all this funding from the NCF, where does NCF get its money? We don’t know all of their donors,
but a few prominent names jump out, like David Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby. That’s just the start.
Other major NCF donors include the Maclellan Foundation (which has given over $100 million to NCF, including $4.65 million in 2017), the Bolthouse Foundation ($9.6 million in 2017), and the family foundation of GOP megadonor Foster Friess ($2.5 million, the majority of its charitable donations, in the 2017 fiscal year).
The Florida-based Free Family Foundation, which says it believes in “working together to share the love of Christ,” has given millions to NCF in recent years, including all of its nearly $1.5 million in charitable contributions in 2017. The JSC Foundation, which is run by heirs of the Coors beer fortune, took in $1.5 million in total revenue in 2015 but gave a larger amount, $2 million, to NCF. The APF Foundation, which is led by NCF-Tampa Bay board member Chris Peifer, is another NCF donor, having given most of its donations to NCF in the 2017 fiscal year ($145,000).
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