Bouncing Off The Walls

Some of the anti-trans bills are so off the wall that you have to wonder if in their zeal to marginalize us if they have thought over what they are saying. One bill in South Dakota wants to label us as a religion!

The Anti-Trans Lobby’s Real Agenda
Jewish Current
By Jules Gill-Peterson
April 27, 2021


THIS YEAR, over 100 anti-transgender bills have been introduced in more than 25 state legislatures, the vast majority of them banning trans kids, especially girls, from participating in organized sports in school, as well as prohibiting or even criminalizing the delivery of gender-affirming healthcare. One of these bills was North Dakota’s HB 1476, which sought, in its own words, to “prohibit the state from creating or enforcing policies that directly or symbolically respect nonsecular self-asserted sex-based identity narratives or sexual orientation orthodoxy.” This long, wordy proposal categorized trans people, transition-related healthcare for minors, same-sex marriage, drag queens, and any sexual orientation other than hetero as expressions of a “religion” called “secular humanism.”

Introduced on January 18th by a group of five conservative House members, and withdrawn from further consideration only three days later, HB 1476 generated no debate or commentary on the record, and triggered only a limited response from journalists and progressive groups. The bill depicts trans people as “faith-based” adherents to a religious dogma enacted through taking hormones, changing names, and other aspects of transition; by the same token, it recategorizes advocacy by trans people for their civil rights as an act of proselytization. According to the bill’s legal logic, the state of North Dakota is thus justified by the establishment clause of the US constitution in withdrawing legal recognition, protection, and state spending that would benefit trans youth and adults. Further, the bill claims that the state must discriminate against trans people to the point of expelling them from the public sphere by banning their ability to transition, change legal documents, and assemble and express themselves in spaces like schools, because “the state may not directly or symbolically create, enforce, or endorse a policy that respects or promotes nonsecular” beliefs. In other words, the bill uses the rhetoric of religious freedom to declare trans people unfit for public life.

This bill was so idiotic that it embarrassed even the Republicans. As the Republicans push their “religious freedom” they are at the same time attempting label us as a religion and ban us. Duh!

But this brings up a question what is the ultimate goal of all these anti-trans bills? The article says,

...As HB 1476 shows, this legislative tactic is an attempt to use trans people as a pretext for a broader reformation of civil life and citizenship to advance an authoritarian, Christian state policy on sex and gender. From this vantage point, it shares its strongest affinities with antisemitic, Islamophobic, and New Jim Crow-era anti-Black politics; it is also an example of settler colonial logic, since the state’s indigenous population would find its Two-Spirit cultures and practices disestablished under the law.

The article goes on to say what might be behind this anti-trans push.

The current wave of bills attacking trans children follow this playbook. A close look at HB 1476 suggests that there are two steps to this process. The first is to declare trans people uncivil, aberrations from the desired norms of the state and the law, and therefore unworthy of the status and privileges accorded to citizens. (In this case, trans people are accused of adhering to the religion of “secular humanism” in violation of the political contract for participating publicly in the secular state.)…

...The second axis of the bill’s logic justifies the state’s withdrawal of public welfare in arenas like healthcare, education, and civil rights for all but the Christian ethnostate’s privileged ruling class.

These bills are being push by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and the Family Research Council. Two of the organizations the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Family Research Council are far right Christian organizations and all the organizations also had a hand in picking the Trump’s judges.

I feel that the author might be on the right track. I feel that they are picking the low hanging fruit… um an apple in the Garden of Eden? They are attacking us because not too many people know anything about us and in that doubt they are pushing their lies about hormones, puberty blockers, and surgery. How many times have you Republican legislators say children are having surgery, or puberty blockers are something new and irreversible, or children are being given hormones. But the public doesn’t know that they are lies.

If these so called Christian organizations get to circumvent the gender non-discrimination laws by declaring it is “against their religious beliefs” where does it end. The Bible can used to justify slavery, wife beating, rape, religious discrimination, and child abuse; will someone say that they didn’t serve a Black person because it goes against their religion?

The Hill had an editorial by Andrew Koppelman that said this about a religious freedom case,

The Supreme Court has just created an aristocracy of the religious, who now can plausibly demand the right to defy almost any law. The Court has sometimes been willing to accommodate conscientious objectors, but its earlier decisions were nothing like what it has now done. By the Court’s logic, human sacrifice now presents a hard case, with a colorable argument for its protection.

I believe that we are a smoke screen for a larger agenda, Koppelman goes on to say.

The Court declares that “government regulations are not neutral and generally applicable, and therefore trigger strict scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause, whenever they treat any comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise.” This calls into question laws that do not mention religion at all, and whose framers almost certainly were not even thinking about religion, such as the one in this case.

I would like to know how the Supreme Court would rule in a case of two people claiming that their religious beliefs were trampled on.

Here is a thought case…

• A conservative walks into a restaurant and is waited on by a trans server and the conservative demand a cis gender server. (An Uber Eats driver was was let go because of a complaint because she was trans)
• The owner says no that the trans server is assigned to these tables and the conservative sues the restaurant for religious discrimination and has a Christian law firm handle the case.
• The owner of the restaurant says it is against his firmly held beliefs for affirmation for all people (And lets throw a monkey wrench in this, the conservative is a member of a well known church and the restaurant owner is an atheist. Will you need to be a member of a church with a written religious code [The Bile] or can you be an individual with a belief system).
• How would a court rule when confronted two competing religious beliefs?

I think the ultimate goal of the Republicans is to create a theocracy/oligarchy.