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Five major advocacy groups working to promote gay rights, reacting to the Supreme Courts decision last week in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, on Tuesday backed off from support for a pending bill in Congress to make it illegal to discriminate in the workplace based on sexual orientation. Some gay rights activists have been working for such a bill for decades, and finally succeeded in the Senate in November.
The withdrawal of support was announced jointly in this statement by the American Civil Liberties Union, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, Lambda Legal, National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Transgender Law Center. The text of the religious exemption in the bill to which they object can be read here. (UPDATE: Another group, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund, has announced a similar stand.)
In the Hobby Lobby decision, the Court ruled on June 30 that federal law gives for-profit businesses that are owned by a small group a right to refuse for religious reasons to provide birth control methods and services for their employees.
The gay rights groups said in their statement: Given the types of workplace discrimination we see increasingly against LGBT [lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender] people, together with the calls for greater permission to discriminate on religious grounds that followed immediately upon the Supreme Courts decision last week in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, it has become clear that the inclusion of this provision is no longer tenable.
They said that the religious exemption written into the bill has long been a source of significant concern to us. But they said they had now concluded, in response to others reaction to the Hobby Lobby ruling, that they could no longer support the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (Senate Bill 815) with that exemption included.
