A federal government obsessed with gender ideology has decided that “misgendering” is now a thought crime. And it is dead set on muzzling religious objectors.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an ostensibly bipartisan federal agency in charge of investigating complaints of employment discrimination in the workplace, has proposed a new “enforcement guidance” that designates the failure to use someone’s preferred pronouns as harassment.
“Misgendering” is one of the new mortal sins of the secular catechism. And there is no recourse in the EEOC’s new enforcement guidance for those with sincerely held religious beliefs that it is wrong to deny the actual biological sex that God has assigned to each human being.
Back in 2020, the Supreme Court expanded the reach of Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination in the workplace in Bostock v. Clayton County. “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch for the 6-3 majority.
The Biden administration pounced upon Gorsuch’s judicial misstep. On the day of his inauguration, President Biden issued an Executive Order announcing that “it is the policy of my administration to prevent and combat discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, and to fully enforce Title VII and other laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation” and directing federal agencies to implement this policy.
Consistent with this order, the EEOC issued a “fact sheet” in June 2021 that took huge liberties with what constitutes discriminatory harassment based on gender identity. A district court subsequently declared the guidance unlawful and set it aside, but ideologues within the administration naturally tried again.
The EEOC’s newly proposed guidance similarly includes “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity” as the basis for prohibited “sex-based discrimination” under Title VII and asserts that “sex-based harassment includes harassment on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, including how that identity is expressed.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4240719-the-eeoc-is-trying-to-make-misgendering-a-thought-crime/
