The radically leftist Democrat government of Virginia is trying to force ministries and religious schools to embrace homosexuals and transsexuals, and now they are being sued for it, according to PJ Media.
Three Christian schools and a Christian pregnancy center network are suing Attorney General Mark Herring (D-Va.) in an attempt to stop the state from imposing two pro-LGBT laws that force “people of faith to adopt a particular government ideology under threat of punishment.”
The two laws were supposedly necessary to prevent “discrimination” against homosexuals and transsexuals, but they in fact force Christian institutions to violate their own, long-held religious beliefs or pay steep fines, to the tune of $100,000 per offense.
All this when nothing compels gays or transsexuals to deal with these institutions in the first place.
The misleadingly named Virginia Values Act (S.B. 868), which claims violation of religious freedom to be a “Virginia value,” and which Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam signed the day before Easter Sunday in the middle of a pandemic, forces churches, religious schools, and Christian ministries to hire staff who do not share their stated beliefs on marriage, sexuality, and gender identity. Its companion law (H.B. 1429) outrageously forces ministries and other Christan institutions to pay for sex-change operations via employee health care plans.
The ministries filed a pre-enforcement challenge, a lawsuit designed to persuade a court to prevent the government from implementing an unconstitutional law.
In the lawsuit, the Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Calvary Road Christian School in Alexandria (preschool through 6th grade, 250 students), Grace Christian School in Staunton (preschool through 12th grade, 320 students), Community Christian Academy in Charlottesville (K-9, 50 students), and Care Net, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that supports 1,100 pregnancy centers, churches, and other ministry organizations and has approximately 22,000 volunteers. “For the Ministries, personnel is policy; and so they intentionally employ staff and recruit volunteers who further their respective Christian missions. Virginia’s new laws, however, make this free religious exercise and association impossible — and label these liberties ‘discrimination,’” the lawsuit argues
