While a majority of voters like the sound of the Equality Act, the same voters overwhelmingly oppose its provisions when they find out what it would do, according to a new national survey of 3,000 likely voters by United Families International. The survey, which boasts a margin of error of less than 2 percent, was weighted to match the demographics of the 2020 presidential electorate and focused on women’s privacy and safety.
By including “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” as constitutionally protected classes, the Equality Act would steamroll religious, speech, parental, and associational freedoms. Among other things, it would force men into women’s sports, prisons, homeless shelters, bathrooms, and domestic violence shelters.
Big Opposition to Forcing Men Into Women’s Spaces
According to the poll by United Families International, 57 percent of voters liked the Equality Act when presented as “prohibiting discrimination” in housing, employment, and public life. Yet when they’re asked about the effective ban on female-only accommodations for privacy and safety — clear outcomes of the law’s provisions — a majority of voters disagree.
When likely voters were asked whether female-only athletic competitions should be banned, only 11 percent said they should, while 74 percent disagreed. Only eight percent supported a ban on female-only homeless and domestic violence shelters, compared to 83 percent who opposed one.
Asked whether they support allowing male sex offenders and domestic abusers to serve their sentences in women’s prisons, only 7 percent said yes while 82 percent said no.
In other words, only about 8 percent of the likely voting public thinks women-only crisis shelters are a dire civil rights emergency that needs to be eradicated. Only 7 percent think incarcerated women should have to bunk and shower with men convicted of domestic violence or sex offenses.
Voters’ Fears Are Already Coming True
These voters’ instincts are based on common sense, and they’re being proved right by the outcomes of policies in other countries and in left-leaning American states.
Male athletes’ heightened speed and strength are based on physical performance advantages that start before birth and don’t go away with hormone suppression. The inclusion of dozens of male athletes in women’s sports, based on gender identity claims, has pushed women and girls out of top spots on podiums. Often, these men’s winning times against women would be mediocre times for the men’s or boys’ competitions.
World Rugby — the only international sporting body to conduct a comprehensive scientific review of the data on gender identity inclusion policies — decided rugby shouldn’t be a mixed-sex sport. Allowing men to participate in contact sports on mixed teams with women posed such a significant risk of injury (particularly head and spinal injuries) to the women, they couldn’t even move on to the question of whether or not it would be competitively fair.
At U.S. women’s shelters, female staff and residents have had to suffer sexual harassment and privacy violations like showering with men, or resort to lawsuits, when faced with a never-repealed, Obama-era funding mandate requiring them to put up with men claiming to be women.
At women’s prisons like those in California, where state officials require corrections staff to house male inmates in (usually lower security) women’s facilities, female inmates live in fear. Example after example of rape and sexual violence from men who simply had to say they’re women, without so much as having to demonstrate surgery or hormone changes, show why.
Serious problems with housing male offenders in women’s prisons have also been documented in Ireland, Canada, and the United Kingdom. How many more women need to be terrorized in state custody before officials get the message that this very unpopular policy is also a dangerous violation of women’s rights?
American voters may have put Democrats in federal office in 2020, but there is no popular mandate for them to destroy important accommodations for women’s privacy, safety, and sporting opportunities. If Democrats — and their handful of Republican enablers — destroy women’s civil rights under a banner of “equality,” they may find voters will eventually judge them on the outcomes instead of the happy label.
Source: The Federalist
