The Leading Edge: Investors Wary of ENDA

The Story: “ENDA a Ploy to Use Gays to Saddle Business with More Bureaurqcracy,” by the editors of Investors Business Daily.

The Lead:

But ENDA isn’t about changing attitudes, or ensuring flourishing businesses.

Everything about it is a chaos agent that’s likely to trample first freedoms and trash business efficiency through new bureaucratic and tort nightmares.

For one, ENDA isn’t focused on protecting the sexual identities of employees, as the Civil Rights Act is, but on extending to particular behaviors associated with unconventional sexuality new protected privileges, notes the Heritage Foundation and other observers.

So under ENDA, if a male kindergarten teacher shows up to work dressed like a woman, nothing would shield children from that introduction to new sex identities.

Males who declare themselves women would be free to use women’s restrooms, and any employer who tries to protect objecting female employees would face lawsuits from either the male or the females.

Christians and people of other faiths who refuse to accept gay marriage would become targets for enforcement, clearly in violation of their faith, despite a weakly written religious protection.

And don’t imagine gay businesses couldn’t be targeted too — the law could force a gay bar owner in West Hollywood to hire an unsuitable Christian on the same logic.

Why it Matters: ENDA passed the Senate yesterday and with it comes a challenge for the House to match their vote. Many have and will continue to make ENDA about not only ending discrimination, but about making businesses more accommodating and tolerant. Neither seem to be valid.

For one, everyone is against unjust discrimination. Everyone. Full stop. Discrimination is evidence that we live in a fallen world with sinful, evil people who do for seek after God, but want to glorify themselves by denying the dignity of others. That is wrong and Christians for millennia have rejected such unjust discrimination and have been the leaders of supporting human dignity and ending evidence of unjust discrimination (think Wilberforce, Douglas, Theresa, etc.).

But is all discrimination, “unjust?” If you run a business, say a hotel, and you are seeking to hire a clerk for the front desk that has to interact with your clientele often and face-to-face. Would you, as a tolerant business owner, hire an applicant that had his face covered in vulgar tattoos, a bone piercing through his nose, and preferred to express himself by wearing a pink tutu over his uniform? Doubtfully, and you would be right to deny that application. But you would also be guilty of discrimination – albeit reasonable discrimination.

As the editors of investors Business Daily make clear, ENDA traps business owners in a deceitful web of tolerance. It promises what it cannot deliver, a world free of unjust discrimination. What it delivers is micro management by a government that keeps businesses from making discerning hires and punishes employees for being a person of faith in public.

Oddly, for all the times I have been angrily told not to, “legislate my morality” on someone, it would seem ENDA does precisely that . . . albeit in an amoral, agnostic sort of way. In terms of public policy, ENDA creates more problems than it solves.

Idealistically, ENDA represents man’s effort to correct aspects of sin that manifest themselves in our daily lives. But no amount of legislation can accomplish what only Christ has fully satisfied on the cross.