At some level, you’ve got to admire House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even if her ideology is deplorable. The woman is absolutely relentless in pushing her radical agenda on the American people. A devout believer in “Rahm’s Rule” – the prescript that Democrats should view every crisis as an opportunity to enact proposals that otherwise stand no chance of being enacted – she has doggedly pursued enacting “goodies” to benefit her constituencies, using the coronavirus crisis as a tool to deliver the goods. That’s exactly what she did late last week with the passage of the latest “relief” bill from the House of Representatives. It will now be up to the US Senate to clean up her mess.
The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) has been watching Pelosi’s moves for some time and has conducted a review of the legislation she designed. The good news from our perspective is that NOM has helped stop her from attempting to enact the most destructive elements of the LGBT agenda, including the incongruously named “Equality Act” and the extreme “Employment Nondiscrimination Act.” That is because of all the attention we brought to the issue and the grassroots pressure we built among members of Congress. However, there are provisions in this bill designed specifically to benefit LGBT groups and other liberal allies that make it imperative that the legislation be stopped.
The Pelosi legislation represents a $3 trillion give away to favored Democrat constituencies. The federal government only took in $3.5 trillion last year, so this is a massive spending proposal. The bill runs to over 1,800 pages and is arguably the biggest piece of special interest legislation in the history of America. This grab-bag of goodies for liberal special interests – blue states, sanctuary cities, the arts and humanities, abortion providers like Planned Parenthood, open border advocates, immigrant groups, billionaires in states like California and New York, etc., etc. – also contains provisions designed to help LGBT groups. None of these have anything to do with the coronavirus crisis. Some examples:
- The legislation contains a $10 million appropriation for the Ryan White HIV/AIDS project. While America has invested billions in HIV prevention, one has to ask why the advent of COVID-19 justifies giving $10 million more to this largely LGBT group.
- The Pelosi legislation also enacts an entirely new “hate crime” scheme backed by the grossly-misnamed Human Rights Campaign. Called the Jabara-Heyer “No Hate Act,” the legislation changes the way that hate crime data is collected and reported. HRC’s goal, of course, is to inflate incidences of alleged bias against the LGBT community so they can use the data to lobby for more special rights and legal protections, as well as a larger share of the federal budget.
- The legislation advances the nebulous notion of “gender diversity.” This is a transparently political move because there are only two genders – male and female. However, as part of their push to institute transgenderism throughout society, LGBT extremists insist that there are innumerable genders – the nonsensical notion that whatever someone identifies as is their gender.
- The legislation appropriates billions of dollars in numerous sections of the bill to go to groups to assist targeted populations in the areas of housing, homelessness, counseling, disability rights and other sectors of society. Many of the organizations in this space that are eligible for grants are LGBT groups that have existing contracts with the government to provide services. The Pelosi legislation requires that the new appropriations go to those groups with existing contracts – a give-away to LGBT and other liberal organizations.
One of the most damaging elements of the legislation is how Pelosi wants to transform elections, beginning with the election this fall where the presidency and control of Congress is up for grabs. She is calling for nationwide on-line voter registration with minimal voter ID requirements. Further, she wants all balloting to be done by mail. The Democrats have become masters of manipulating the elections process by encouraging ineligible people (including illegal immigrants and convicted felons) to register to vote and through the use of “ballot harvesting” whereby Democrat groups collect ballots from supportive voters and return them to elections officials. It’s a process that is ripe for fraud and abuse.
Pelosi’s desire regarding the elections provisions is obvious: she wants to help the Democrats win control of the White House and the US Senate and expand their majority in the House, even if they have to cheat to do it.
President Trump and leaders of the US Senate have sharply condemned Pelosi’s bill and vowed that it will not see the light of day. NOM has launched a petition urging President Trump and the Senate to do just that – asking them to stop Pelosi from hijacking the coronavirus crisis to enact her extreme agenda. Already, over 7,800 people have added their name to the petition and flooded the Senate with emails demanding that they stop Pelosi. We urge all Americans to join in this demand.