Dayton Daily News

Supreme Court’s LGBTQ decision formula for chaos

- Star Parker Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided that homosexual and transgende­r individual­s are covered by the anti-discrimina­tion provision, Title VII, of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his opinion: “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgende­r fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisa­ble role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

When I read the reasoning of Gorsuch, I feel less surprised by the chaos in our cities, and our great difficulti­es and challenges in enforcing the law.

How indeed can we expect sanity in enforcing our laws when such confusion exists in our nation’s highest court about what our law is, and even what our country is about?

The key words in our nation’s Declaratio­n of

Independen­ce are “all men are created equal.”

Created equal.

The horrible history of racial oppression and discrimina­tion in America flew in the face of that great founding premise.

This was exactly the sentiment Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed in his famous dream, that his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Abraham Lincoln got to the heart of the matter when he mocked Stephen Douglas’ claim states should vote on whether they would permit slavery because this was based on biblical principle that man has the power of choice.

“God did not place good and evil before man, telling him to make his choice,” said Lincoln. “On the contrary,” continued Lincoln, “he did tell him there was one tree, of the fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of certain death.”

Man has choice, said Lincoln. But only in a country where there is no standard and conviction of right and wrong does it not matter what you choose.

The essence of a free country is allowing citizens freedom to make and be responsibl­e for their own choices.

To limit that freedom because of circumstan­ce of birth — race or sex — is to make a mockery of freedom.

But to claim, as Douglas did, that once given freedom, it doesn’t matter what individual­s choose ... is to also make a mockery of freedom.

Gorsuch equates our protection against discrimina­tion because of one’s circumstan­ces of birth with discrimina­tion against the choices individual­s make. This is a formula for exactly what we have today: chaos.

America must be free. Individual­s must be free to choose their behavior. But we undermine our religious freedom and all our freedoms when we prohibit private individual­s from rejecting behavior they find immoral.

This moral chaos is exactly what has caused such damage in our at-risk communitie­s.

Rampant abortion, promiscuit­y and the collapse of marriage ... are the result of reasoning like what we now have heard from Gorsuch.

Sen. Tim Scott strikes at the heart of the matter in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. “If you have two parents in the household, you reduce poverty in the African-American community by 85%. That’s a stunning truth that needs more oxygen.”

The right choices lead to better lives.

A society that cannot distinguis­h between what God creates and what man chooses is a society not capable of being free. This is what our very confused Supreme Court is delivering to us.

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