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What is Happening with House Bill 176?
Many of our supporters and friends have asked us, “What is happening with House Bill 176?” The legislation to enshrine sexual orientation in Ohio’s civil rights and non-discrimination laws is still very much alive and potentially poised to change Ohio’s landscape and impact our religious liberties in significant ways.
House Bill 176, the Equal Housing and Employment Act, introduced by Rep. Dan Stewart (Democrat, Columbus) and Rep. Ross McGregor (Republican, Springfield), has the following harmful attributes:
- House Bill 176 creates special protections for “sexual orientations” to include homosexual, bisexual and trans-gendered classifications.
- House Bill 176 creates unfunded mandates and unintended consequences on Ohio employers, effects which are not justified for the supposed good to be accomplished. The desire to accommodate what amount to 2.9% of Ohio’s population and only 0.4% of the state’s households with special protections for deviant sexual behaviors is a poor policy decision. Our state’s economic condition is perilous, and more mandates on Ohio employers with threats of penalties are not the answer to our problems.
- House Bill 176 contains language (Section 4112.04(A)(9)) that mandates comprehensive educational programming for both primary and secondary schools in Ohio, which is designed to “eliminate prejudice, and to emphasize the origin of prejudice and discrimination, their harmful effects, and their incompatibility with American principles of equality and fair play.” This language possibly creates a conflict between the current teaching of abstinence-until-marriage education in our schools and the issue of homosexual unions, homosexual marriage, and “prejudice” of not allowing homosexual marriage in Ohio.
The legislation has 38 cosponsors and it was passed by the Ohio House of Representatives on September 15 by a vote of 56-39. It was sent to the Ohio Senate on September 17 of this year, and has not been moved from the Senate Rules committee to any standing committee of the Ohio Senate as of this writing. Senate President Bill Harris (Republican, Ashland) has been noted as saying that he doesn’t find this bill to be necessary, but there is intense lobbying taking place by the homosexual rights lobby.
Click here to contact your Ohio Senator and request that this bill is not passed.
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