Well, in case you didn’t hear, because, frankly, who can keep up with all the nightmarish and horrifyingly stupid and evil legislation and policies and legal decisions coming from the Great Swamp somewhere in the Maryland/ Virginia area – don’t worry, it’ll soon be a state – the Equality Act passed the House. First and foremost, the name “Equality Act” is a bit of Orwellian Newspeak the likes of which are becoming increasingly common in today’s public discourse, because as Dan Crenshaw points out the Equality Act isn’t about Equality.

Now, I read the WHOLE thing. The WHOLE bill. And most of it, I’ve read 3 or 4 times. And you can read it too. And you should; read it for yourself. Seriously, read what the people you send to Washington do with their time and the money they’re printing on the promise that your children and grandchildren will pay it off.

Now, as has been pointed out by many, there are some enormous problems with this bill. First, the basis of the bill is the “discrimination” that homosexuals and transsexuals experience. Note that they don’t define what discrimination is. Moreover, they make grandiose claims that transgender people experience housing discrimination because 1 in 5 transgender people experience homelessness in their lives. The bill simply presumes that there are no other mitigating factors – like, you know, having a mental illness – that might have something to do with experiencing higher-than-normal rates of homelessness and having lower-than-normal rates of homeownership. Another, actually very funny piece of insanity is found in §2(a)(2) where it states that transgender persons have trouble getting housed in shelters – presumably women’s shelters. ‘Cause, yeah, women’s shelters don’t take in men – particularly mentally disturbed men. But hey, why should battered women get their own shelters, amiright? This cisgendered women’s privilege is hateful. But, hey, that’s pretty much par for the course in today’s political jungle, all inequalities are inequities and nothing is anybody’s fault. Well, that’s not true – white, cisgendered, heterosexual, men (especially if they are conservative and/ or Christians) those jerks are to blame for everything. Also, white women when they agree with anything anyone to the right of Nancy Pelosi says is also part of the Patriarchy that is systemically racist…as are, you know, black people – lots black people are systemically racist and not really black and, I guess they are getting white privilege, too? Well, just in case you think that to say that black people can have white privilege is too ridiculous even for the Wokest of the Woke to believe, you’d be wrong – because nothing is too insane for the Woke. Here’s some proof! Also, more proof! But that’s beside the point. The point is that the House Bill – which passed – is full of nonsense, as the basis of the law, and it doesn’t get better. I’d like to quote just a few little subsections from the Bill and then we’re going to talk about it and why it’s getting so much support from the business community.

Ok, so the most obviously stupid and self-contradictory incoherence in this bill is found in §9 under §1101 Definitions and Rules (b)(2) is says:

“(2) (with respect to gender identity) an individual shall not be denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual's gender identity.”

Let’s reread that in case you missed it.

That means that if you’re a boy and you want to go into the girl’s shower – have at it, boy-o! This, on its face, should have made the bill totally and completely unacceptable. But it didn’t, because we live in the stupidest time in history. And while this is what’s going to attract the most attention…because it’s the most obviously egregious, there are other more disturbing aspects to this bill. For instance, the revocation of any protection because of religious beliefs – look just a little bit below at §9 §1107 “Claims” says:

“The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (42 U.S.C. 2000bb et seq.) shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.”

So, just as a for instance, if your church has a men’s room and a women’s room, you can’t keep some pervert from going into the women’s room. I mean, not legally. But, again, this is the obvious evil – there’s a subtler and more nefarious evil that lurks in the implications. And that is that this bill also revokes the right for employers to not pay for abortions – even if they have religious objections. And what’s more – it will also make way for doctors to not have the right to not perform abortions! And it isn’t just cranks saying that this is ties up in the bill, there are congressmen saying this.

And while these are evil enough this isn’t ideological evil for the sake of evil – well, not entirely. Because there is a financial side to this that is disturbing to the extreme and should be, yet another, reason why Feminists should be opposing this bill with every ounce of strength they have.

In America Magazine Erika Bachiochi had an extremely insightful piece, that, sadly was too long and too well written to edit efficiently, and so, sadly, I couldn’t use it as the basis for today’s episode. However, it’s very worth checking out. I’ve linked it here, so radio listeners can go to lukenagy.com and go to the blog and find the link in the text. But if you are some kind of self-loathing masochist who doesn’t want to go to my website and read and listen to all my brilliant and handsome content, you can just search for America Magazine and Equality Act – you know, if you’re that kinda person. But anyways, that’s enough shameless self-promotion.

Erika makes a crucial connection and one which, I think, exposes that this bill promotes things more evil than evil of simply promoting transgenderism. She writes:

Since the high court has not yet, and is unlikely to, protect abortion rights via the equal protection clause, amending federal sex discrimination law is the next best thing for pro-choice advocates. Thus, the drafters of the Equality Act have written into the bill a new free-standing prohibition on pregnancy discrimination, shorn of the neutral language found in the original P.D.A., which requires that abortion be treated no differently than other physical conditions.

The short section reads: “Pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical condition [read: abortion] shall not receive less favorable treatment than other physical conditions.”

And so, an institution or individual that provides or funds health care but not abortion (including, one assumes, state governments), would be discriminating on the basis of sex. Catholic doctors and hospitals would have no recourse to federal conscience protections.

But requiring abortion to be funded by states and covered by insurers as “health care” would only further incentivize employers to prefer abortion for their pregnant employees over far more costly accommodations for parenting. Correcting this unyielding logic of the market was the whole purpose of the original P.D.A. Indeed, even with the P.D.A. in place, pregnancy discrimination is still rampant in the United States, and many women feel they need to hide their pregnancies at work.

Clearly, those with caregiving responsibilities are far more costly to their employers than the unencumbered, and big business is increasingly transparent about its economic incentives. As Doreen Denny reported last year, of the hundred plus chief executive officers who took out a full-page ad in The New York Times “stand[ing] up for reproductive health care,” only two of them are included among the top companies offering paid maternity leave. A 2020 report by Rhia Ventures, “Hidden Value: The Business Case for Reproductive Health,” recommends covering contraception and abortion as a way for employers to provide “high-impact benefits with low-cost investment.” And while debating whether an anti-abortion amendment to their state constitution would be voted on in 2022, Kansas Governor Laura Kelly argued that the right to an abortion was an “economic development issue.” Businesses “really look to see what kind of inclusive policies we have in place to make it easier for them to recruit and retrain [sic] a talented workforce.”

Clearly, more than anti-discrimination law is needed to support pregnant women and their families today. But the Equality Act takes us in exactly the wrong direction. It may be good for businesses’ bottom line, but it would be devastating for women and their families.

And Ms. Bachiochi makes here the key and crucial insight that too often people miss and that’s that big-business in America is fundamentally pro-abortion – not pro-choice, but pro-abortion – because keeping smart, capable, and talented women in their cubicles and out of the home is necessary for the success of their businesses, not only because the cost of paying out health-care expenses for maternity leave is cost-prohibitive, but because women are talented and necessary members of the workforce in the current distribution of labor. Abortions are relatively cheap, outpatient procedures, that apart from the moral and emotional damage that is concomitant with murdering your own baby inside of you, ensure that women are able to keep working.

Too often the sheer dollars and cents of baby-murder is ignored or is placed in other places. People look at the profiteering of the abortion industry. People talk about the hedonism of women (and men) who are able to live their dreams because they’re unencumbered with the cost and responsibility of caring for or raising a child…or presumably giving him or her up for adoption.

But let’s not forget the other economic aspect: the incentive for big-business to disincentivize pregnancy and incentivize abortion. Now, certainly, as I wrote about just the other day in a piece called, Call Me Offred, all nations have a deep and vested interest in having a large population. So, nations that are not overpopulated have a strong incentive to institute pronatalist policies. But business can afford to be shortsighted, and in many ways, businesses NEED to be shortsighted because businesses have to make a profit pretty much every year or things get dicey. In other words, businesses have a much shorter window and have a lot more hard realities to face. Businesses can’t print money – I mean, they CAN, but I think it’s illegal. Governments can. Business have to make a profit – Governments don’t. Businesses are answerable to shareholders ALL THE TIME and they can go bankrupt and dissolve – Governments tend to not just go bankrupt and dissolve…even if they are bankrupt.

The love of money, here, reasserts itself as the root of all kinds of evil, including promoting abortion in the workplace, and working hand-in-glove with government to keep women chained to their desks while claiming that their shattering the shackles that keep them chained at home.

For the first time in a long time, there is an issue where Liberal Feminists and Conservative Christians can take the same policy position for the same reasons. Opposing the Equality Act is one of them. This bill is evil, anti-woman, anti-moral, anti-life, and anti-Christian. As Christians we need to know about and understand what’s happening in our society and how deep the roots of this evil go. And then we need to take action.