Kevin McCarthy: Transgender Bill Threatens Girls’ Sports, Religious Freedom

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) speaks during a House Republican Leadership ne
Al Drago/Getty Images
Neil Munro

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy criticized the Democrats’ revolutionary pro-transgender bill, now slated for a Thursday vote.

The pro-transgender bill, for example, would use the law to deny any recognition of the two sexes’ complementary differences. So it would force women to treat men as if they are women, it would end single-sex private spaces, and it would allow males to participate in women’s sports, regardless of male athletic advantages.

When asked about the pending bill during his short press conference Wednesday, McCarthy referred to the impact on sports and religious freedom.

The questioner asked about the “Equality Act”:

Democrats want it passed. Senate Republicans say this is not only an attack on girls against women’s sports, but also attack on churches, opening them up for possible lawsuits.

“Very clear,” McCarthy responded, adding, “I mean if you look at [President Joe] Biden’s appointments to cabinet members — suing nuns and others — this really seems like an onslaught against freedom of religion. Girls’ sports as well and others.”

On February 23, the Wall Street Journal posted a comprehensive criticism of the Democrats’ anti-biology bill under the headline “The Equality Act Makes Women Unequal: H.R. 5 erases ‘sex’ as a legal category, with dire consequences.”

Author Inez Stepman wrote:

H.R. 5, styled the Equality Act, would redefine “sex” under federal civil-rights laws to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” overriding basic biology along with millennia of tradition.

…

The Equality Act would go much further by making it illegal to distinguish “identity” from biology and thereby prioritize transgender people over women. By erasing sex as a distinct legal category, the measure threatens to open up female-only spaces and opportunities designed to increase representation for girls to biological men, which can endanger the safety of women and girls.

The Equality Act would threaten the existence of women’s prisons, public-school girls’ locker rooms, and women’s and girls’ sports teams. It would limit freedom of speech, freedom of association, accurate data collection, and scientific inquiry. It would threaten the rights of physicians who doubt the wisdom of performing life-changing, reproduction-limiting procedures, and parents who seek to protect their minor children from such treatment.

“Under the guise of fairness, the Equality Act would forbid policymakers from ever taking into consideration the differences between men and women that are necessary in order to guarantee safety and equality of the sexes,” wrote Stepman, a policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum.

Nearly all progressives back the bill because it allows government officials to regulate the biological and cultural foundation of human sexuality. Many feminists also back it because other portions of the bill would create a legislative right to abortion.

Many business groups support the bill, in part because they work hand-in-glove with progressive groups who strongly favor the expansion of government power into sexuality. In practice, this cooperation means the GOP’s pro-business wing is reluctant to publicly oppose the bill because the opposition would complicate their alliance with progressives and so threaten progressive acceptance of pro-business legislation.

A handful of GOP legislators may vote for the bill on Thursday — leaving a small group of swing-voting GOP Senators to decide if they want to pass a similar bill through the Senate.

The bill is opposed by a broad front of conservative, libertarian and feminist groups, including the Women’s Liberation Front. The vast majority of the public — including liberal women — opposes the civic changes required by the bill.

Few reporters in the establishment media dare cover the core political disagreement in the fight, mostly because they are under intense workplace pressure from pro-transgender peers.

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