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| If the House GOP gets its way, this will be the future and gays will be giving up tax dollars to fund it. |
From Dominic Holden at Buzzfeed comes news that House Republicans just advanced an amendment out of committee which would allow adoption agencies to discriminate against gays while still helping themselves to gay tax dollars under the guise of "religious liberty."
The House Appropriations Committee advanced the amendment, introduced by Alabama Rep. Robert Aderholt, that says adoption agencies declining a child welfare service based on “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions” could not be punished.
Specifically, agencies that reject applicants, including gay couples and divorcées, based on religious objections, could not be denied federal funding. Nor could a state deny funding to agencies if it receives federal funding for child welfare services under the Social Security Act.
Further, the measure would punish LGBT-friendly states. The Department of Health and Human Services would withhold 15% of its annual adoption dispersals from states that don’t meet the same standards for protecting religious adoption groups. States could lose federal adoption funds, for instance, if they ban anti-LGBT discrimination — thereby tilting federal adoption funding toward states that allow religious recusals.
According to Holden's article, the amendment goes in front of the entire House as a part of the federal budget where it could face opposition - or rather HAD BETTER face opposition - from Democrats and moderate Republicans.
Holden also pointed out that Alabama Rep. Robert Aderholt, who introduced the amendment, sent out the following tweet:
Today my colleagues and I of the @HouseAppropsGOP passed my amendment which prohibits the discrimination of child welfare providers based on religious beliefs or moral convictions.— Rep. Robert Aderholt (@Robert_Aderholt) July 11, 2018
Conveniently Aderholt failed to address the lack of fairness in making LGBT taxpayers give their hard-earned monies to groups which would freely discriminate against us.
You gotta love those Republicans. They won't do anything to reign in the disaster that is the Trump Administration. They won't do anything about gun control. And they certainly won't do a thing about how the Trump Administration is committing a human rights disaster by stealing migrant children from their parents.
But they will bend over backwards to screw with us.
Y'all probably know what I am going to say, but I will repeat myself anyway.
We told folks that this nonsense about "religious liberty" wasn't just about cakes or flowers at gay weddings.
It's about weaponizing religion, one particular religion - i.e. conservative evangelical Christianity - to create a legal right to discriminate against the LGBT community. I hope it makes you angry enough to raise hell to your representatives, friends, and neighbors, and especially to vote in November.
