A bill which seeks to add sexual
orientation as a protected class to Michigan's Elliott-Larsen Civil
Rights Act of 1976 has been tabled after lawmakers held a contentious
hearing on Wednesday.
House Speaker Jase Bolger's office said
that demands by Democrats to add gender identity to the proposed
legislation had killed the effort.
“The extremists on the left were
successful in preventing civil rights protections for gays and
lesbians in Michigan,” Ari Adler, Bolger's spokesman, is quoted as
saying by The
Detroit News.
“By taking a hard line and insisting
that we provide double protection for transgender individuals, they
blocked protections for gays, lesbians and bisexuals,” Adler said,
a reference to Bolger's argument that transgender people are already
protected under the classification of “sex.”
The current law prohibits
discrimination in the areas of employment, housing and public
accommodations based on age, race, sex, religion and other factors.
At a House Commerce Committee hearing
on Wednesday, Republican Rep. Frank Foster, chairman of the
committee, said that there were not enough votes on his committee to
advance his legislation, which only includes sexual orientation, to
the House floor.
Pastor Stacy Swimp testified against
the bill, calling it “yet another step in the assault on religious
liberty.”
“There's a comparison between the
homosexual allegation of gay rights and black civil rights,”
Swimp
said. “And as a minister of the Gospel, and as a black
American … I stand here today rather offended. … No one from the
LGBT community has ever had fire hoses turned on them by the police
department, they have never had to drink out of an LGBT water
fountain.”
Foster questioned Swimp's statements:
“Did you listen to the ACLU's testimony? Because I'll be happy to
bring them back up again.”
“I just want to remind you of the
lynching of Matthew Shepard,” Democratic Rep. Henry Yanez said to
applause.
In a Thanksgiving message to
supporters, Representative-elect Todd Courser, a Republican, said
that if approved, the legislation would discriminate against
Christians.
“Thanksgiving is about the impossible
journey of a small group of worshipers who took flight from
oppression to have the freedom to practice their religion without the
interference of government,” Courser
wrote, “we are now, if this expansion to Elliott Larsen passes
at the hands of my own party, at the point where the group that will
be discriminated against is Christians and any other faith that
chooses to stand against the LGBT activists – we will no longer
have the freedom to practice our religion or have freedom of speech
that our Founders personally sacrificed to give us.”
He added that it was his responsibility
as an elected official to stand up against “evil.”
“We, as Republican Elected Officials
cannot allow leaders, who exist by the power they derived from our
districts, to promote evil, without standing up and forcing the
issues into the public; if we do then we ourselves are complicit in
this unholy alliance. Right now, it is the Republican, not the
Democrat, leadership who is moving to grant protected class status to
the LGBT community and in so doing destroy freedoms of religion and
speech for our children and their children,” he said.