From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-thompson/enda-religious-exemption_b_3193011.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices
Ian Thompson and Dena Sher
05/01/2013
Remarkably, there are only 16 states that currently have workplace non-discrimination laws that are fully inclusive of LGBT people. This leaves LGBT people vulnerable to workplace discrimination in well over half of the country — an unacceptable situation that must be changed.
To address this, last week, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) was reintroduced in Congress. The legislation would prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in most American workplaces, a critically important step towards full equality for LGBT people.
Of all the various bills in Congress impacting LGBT people, ENDA is the most important. In reintroducing the legislation, ENDA’s congressional sponsors made a number of significant improvements to the new version of the bill. For instance, they deleted a provision from previous years that would have reaffirmed the discriminatory and unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
And though significant and important changes were made, one really bad provision was unchanged from past versions of the bill. It still has an unprecedented and overly broad exemption for religiously affiliated employers. You may be asking, “Is this really such a big deal?” The ACLU firmly believes that it is.
Title VII of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act grants churches, synagogues, and mosques, as well as some religiously affiliated organizations an exemption from the law’s prohibition on religious hiring discrimination-meaning they can prefer members of their own faith in hiring. The purpose of this exemption is to permit a religious organization to require those who carry out its work to share its faith (and it has subsequently been interpreted to apply even when an employee’s work is not itself religious). But, it is not a blank check for these organizations to discriminate for any reason. It does not, for example, permit discrimination on the basis of race or sex.
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