As Donald Trump readies to sign an order that many expect will give religious people sweeping latitude to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans, civil rights groups are preparing to immediately launch a legal challenge. Dominic Holden reports:
Depending on how a final order is worded, legal groups say they are prepared to try blocking it in federal courts on constitutional grounds, thereby hoping to hand Trump another high-profile defeat like those he has faced so far with his travel bans.
“We will fight this with everything we have,” Lambda Legal senior counsel Camilla Taylor said Tuesday, adding, “We are prepared to sue in a very short timeframe if the executive order closely resembles the leaked drafts.”
She said the group has already assembled plaintiffs for their lawsuit.
An original draft of the order, which was spearheaded by distinguished homophobe Mike Pence and leaked to The Nation in early February, was widely viewed by civil rights advocates as violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It gave broad license to discriminate to both individuals and organizations (including for-profits) that have religious or moral objections to LGBTQ-identified people, same-sex marriage, abortion, and pre-marital sex. Sarah Posner originally reported:
The draft document specifically protects the tax-exempt status of any organization that “believes, speaks, or acts (or declines to act) in accordance with the belief that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, sexual relations are properly reserved for such a marriage, male and female and their equivalents refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy, physiology, or genetics at or before birth, and that human life begins at conception and merits protection at all stages of life.”
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2q03oAh
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