Christian conservative Mat Staver has
claimed that the Equality Act would force schools to hire pedophiles
and “goat lovers.”
Staver is the president of Liberty
Counsel, a group which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has
labeled a “hate group” for its promotion of “anti-LGBT
discrimination under the guise of religious liberty.”
Last week, the Equality Act, which
seeks to add sexual orientation and gender identity to current civil
rights laws, cleared the House of Representatives.
(Related: House
approves LGBT protections bill Equality Act.)
In an email to supporters sent Friday,
Staver claims that if the Equality Act became law, “schools [that]
refuse to hire a crossdresser, a pedophile or a goat lover” would
be “penalized.”
“I know this sounds absurd – but
sadly, it's true,” he added.
“This bill is a Pandora's Box of evil
… [that would] force religious institutions to accept and promote
homosexual, bisexual, transvestite, transexual and any of the 550
paraphilia behaviors,” Staver wrote.
Staver said that the bill also would
protect other “sexual perversions” such as “pedophilia,
necrophilia, bestiality and more.”
The Equality Act, however, defines
sexual orientation to mean “homosexuality, heterosexuality, or
bisexuality.”
Writing at Right Wing Watch, Peter
Montgomery called out Staver's claims.
“Wild accusations from
religious-right groups about the Equality Act criminalizing
Christianity echo equally false claims that religious-right leaders
made more than a decade ago when they were opposing legislation that
would add sexual orientation to federal hate crimes laws,” he
wrote. “That, of course, has not happened, and more than 11
years after former President Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard
and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law,
religious-right leaders like Staver still have the freedom to spread
lies about the LGBTQ community.”