The Texas legislature only meets every other year. So, with the last day of session rapidly approaching, the past few days – yes, even including the weekend – have been wild. The result: A lot of harmful policies are closer to becoming law. Here’s a roundup of the legislature’s troubling actions over past couple of days:
I decided to intern at Americans United because I wanted to learn more about communications and I wanted to be involved in a cause that I am passionate about. Separation of church and state is an important issue to me and I wanted to be able to promote it while growing professionally.
State legislators in South Dakota and Texas introduced bills that would allow broad discrimination against potential adoptive parents and children under the guise of religious freedom.
Texas’ HB 3859 would allow taxpayer-funded child welfare service providers to refuse to serve any child or family if doing so is contrary to the agency’s religious beliefs, creating a loophole for discrimination against same-sex couples, religious minority couples and others.
On Tuesday, the White House issued a statement, claiming President Donald Trump is “respectful and supportive of LGBTQ rights.” The very next day, though, we saw a draft executive order that contains perhaps the most sweeping attack on LGBTQ and women’s rights in the name of religion that we have ever seen.
Alabama must recognize adoptions by same-sex couples that were legalized in other states, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March.
The decision overturned an earlier verdict from the Alabama Supreme Court, which found that the state of Georgia had erred by recognizing a lesbian woman’s adoption of the three children she shared with her former partner.
The woman, identified in court documents as V.L., and her family lived in Alabama from 1995 to 2011, but the couple briefly moved to Georgia in 2006 to have the adoption recognized.
Spare a thought for Roy Moore.
Moore likely thought that as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court he’d finally have the authority to enforce God’s moral law. Theocracy has, after all, been the raison d’etre of his career. But our secular legal system – or Satan, depending on who you ask – has thwarted him at every turn.
Legislators and media pundits in Washington, D.C., continue to obsess over the birth control mandate in the new health care law and whether church-related institutions like hospitals and colleges must provide contraceptive coverage.
While that’s going, a quieter tussle in Virginia has captured fewer national headlines. That’s a shame because a debate over adoption by same-sex couples in that state is perhaps a better indicator of where the Religious Right wants to take this country.
