Today, President Obama is expected to sign an executive order to ban discrimination of LGTBQ individuals by companies that do government work.
Significantly, it will contain no exemption for religious groups who do not agree with the order.
Whether or not to include a religious freedom provision has been the subject of much debate in the past few weeks. Religious leaders have been pressuring Obama heavily to include one, while gay rights groups were largely arguing in the opposite direction.
Though there were religious leaders who argued against including an exemption,
“Those of us who really care deeply about both the sanctity and the necessity of religious freedom have grieved to see people use that as a cover for overt discrimination, and the president is not going to allow that to happen,” said the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, the president of the Interfaith Alliance.
Mr. Gaddy — who helped organize 100 liberal religious leaders to write to Mr. Obama to oppose the exemption — said the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case “shined a bright light” on some groups’ efforts to use religious freedom as an excuse for violating the rights of others.
Read the whole NY Times article here.