New Anti-Discrimination Bills Protecting LGBTQ People Will ‘Ban Christianity’ Say Fear-Mongering Conservatives

Claims Legislation Will ‘Ban the Bible’ Are Lies

Conservatives across the country are fighting several Democratic-sponsored non-discrimination bills that would protect LGBTQ people in Texas.

“If you want a sense of where the left is headed nationally, look at what progressive legislators in Texas are trying to do. They want to ban Christianity in all but name,” writes Georgia-based religious extremist and former Fox News pundit Erick Erickson, who now writes at The Resurgent. Erickson is perhaps best known (or should be) for comparing LGBT people to ISIS.

He points to six new non-discrimination bills filed in the Texas legislature. Among them, legislation that would require businesses in Texas to treat employees who are married to a person of the same sex the same way they treat employees who are married to a person of a different sex when allocating benefits packages.

Others require Texas businesses to allow transgender people to use the restroom with which they most-closely associate. Another would require physicians, “even against their conscience,” Erickson warns, to prepare birth certificates that conform to a person’s gender identity.

“Progressives in Texas also want to roll back state protections for faith based adoption agencies,” Erickson writes, warning that adoption agencies wouldn’t be allowed to ban same-sex couples or LGBTQ children.

“If the left is this emboldened in Texas, think about how far they’ll go in your state,” he fear-mongers once again.

KTBS reported in December there were 3800 children waiting to be adopted in Texas. And in 2016 “there were 28,732 children in foster care in Texas,” CBS 19 reports. Erickson would like to make it harder for those children to be adopted, by allowing agencies to reduce the number of possible homes and families they will consider.

Erickson sums up all these bills as the left wanting to “go after” Christian businesses.

Meanwhile, Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) adds more fear-mongering, from Dave Welch, the president of the Texas Pastors Council. Welch appears to claim that being gay, lesbian, or bisexual is merely “sexual behavior,” and being transgender is “mental illness,” if we’re interpreting his bigotry accurately:

“The mad dash by some Democrat House and Senate members to push false narratives that sexual behavior is the same as skin color and that mental illness deserves the same honored status as religious belief is ominous evidence that the criminalization of religious faith and common sense are on the horizon.”

That’s of course, false.

And over at the far right wing website The Federalist, James Wesolek claims the bills Erickson warns about “would attack people of faith so aggressively that they can justifiably be described as ‘Ban the Bible’ bills,” which is astonishingly false. He calls wanting to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination “swamp sickness.”

Even though “Ban the Bible” is a lie, conservatives are all over it, even creating a #BanTheBible hashtag.

“These ‘Ban the Bible’ bills at the Texas Legislature shock the conscience and must be stopped,” Nicole Hudgens, senior policy analyst for Texas Values, said, as the conservative website PJ Media says. “Creating more government control and threatening Christians with jail time or fines does not create a tolerant society.”

Texas Values also falsely claims these bills “allow the government to criminalize people of faith,” and “highlight a growing national trend to punish people of faith by forcing them to celebrate LGBT viewpoints or values and reject their own sincerely held religious beliefs on marriage, human sexuality, and life.”