Denied a Home for Being #LGBT Why religious belief must not trump human rights

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This is several months old but worth the read




Denied a Home for Being LGBT
Why religious belief must not trump human rights


https://medium.com/james-finn/denied-a-home-for-being-lgbt-fbdc3cdb051f



James Finn Jun 26, 2019 · 5 min read


Photo by Kat Jayne from Pexels
Should religious people be free to discriminate?

People who oppose the proposed US federal LGBT Equality Act do so almost entirely on religious grounds. And they are succeeding. The Act will not pass this year because religious people oppose it. Private religious organizations claim they ought to have the right to discriminate against gender and sexual minorities.

They say that religious freedom equals the freedom to exclude people. They sometimes use different words than I’m using, to make discrimination and exclusion sound more palatable.

That’s a perverse outcome of religious freedom. It’s exactly the kind of outcome that the Canadian Supreme Court prevented when they ruled in December that religious belief systems are fundamentally less important than human rights.

Other nations “get it.” Courts in Canada recently ruled, for example, that basic human rights must take precedence over religious belief.


Does that sound radical?

Maybe it wouldn’t if you and your family were the targets of religious condemnation. But let’s put aside rhetoric and look at real life. People’s lives are more powerful than words. Case in point: two women getting on in age can’t live together in their own hometown because religious people demand the “freedom” to exclude them.


This is what Equality Act opponents are fighting for

My wife Bev and I have known each other since we were teenagers and played in the same softball league. We hit it off after college and were close friends before we became a couple in 1978. We’ve been together ever since. Our same-sex marriage didn’t protect us from housing discrimination that broke our hearts.

— Mary Walsh writing in USA Today about being denied housing because she’s legally married to a woma

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The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled that the right of LGBTQ people to live as equal members of Canadian society trumps the rights of religious people to discriminate......................................