The 2019 Legislative Session is barely underway, but anti-equality extremists are already coming out hard against our community. We need to send a message to lawmakers that targeting LGBTQ Texans won’t be tolerated.
Earlier this week, Texas Values—a notorious anti-equality advocacy group that fights to undermine marriage equality and targets transgender Texans—launched a new attack on our top priority legislation. We’re pushing hard this session to update Texas non-discrimination laws to include LGBTQ Texans at long last.
Texas Values knows that the majority of Texans support non-discrimination protections for everyone, so they’re resorting to the pernicious lie that these bills would “ban the Bible.”
And yesterday, Representative Bill Zedler (R-Arlington) filed a sweeping religious exemption bill that creates special rights solely for those who oppose marriage equality and reject transgender people.
So much for “love thy neighbor,” right?
Zedler’s bill would legally protect discrimination in healthcare, in social services, in the workplace, in access to housing, in business, and even in government. And believe it or not, the bill even contains some of the same divisive bathroom regulations we fought so hard against in 2017! We fear this is the first of many such bills we’ll see this session.
These attacks are part of a coordinated national strategy to roll back the progress we’ve made. And frightening the public into thinking that equality is somehow a threat to people of faith is a tried-and-true tactic of the extremists.
We’ve got to stop this plan in its tracks! We need to let lawmakers know that Texans aren’t falling for it this time.
A flood of grassroots messages is our best strategy to stop these bills. Please take a minute right now to let your lawmakers know where you stand!
If you attack one Texan, you attack all Texans!