‘Fairness for All’ Is Well Intentioned but Inadequate and Misguided

Working to find legislative compromise can be a good thing. But not every bill that calls itself a compromise is a good compromise.

And that, sadly, is the case with the so-called “Fairness for All” legislation introduced Friday.

Over the past several years I’ve been in dialogue with the main scholars and civic leaders promoting and drafting this legislation (including participating in a conference on it at Yale Law School in 2017 and authoring a chapter on the approach—and suggesting a better approach—in a Cambridge University Press book published this year). I have reviewed the 69-page legislative draft over the past several weeks.

Despite the undoubted good will of those who drafted and introduced the legislation, and despite some meaningful though insufficient protections for religious liberty, the bill is not in fact fair for all. Its protections for religious liberty come at the high cost of enshrining a misguided sexual and gender ideology into federal law. This will allow the federal government to use our civil rights laws as a sword to punish citizens who dissent from the reigning sexual orthodoxy. This is certain to create significant harm to the common good, especially for the privacy, safety, and equality of women and girls.

The high costs of the Fairness for All compromise shouldn’t be surprising, because the compromise the bill sought was mis-framed from the beginning.

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