Having already advanced through the U.S. House of Representatives in 2021, the Equality Act would ban discrimination against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. With broad support among Democrats, many Republicans oppose the bill, fearing it will infringe on their religious freedom. Whether it passes through the Senate might very well be determined by the outcomes in a number of upcoming key Senate races. Straight Arrow News contributor Newt Gingrich argues the Equality Act is a gross overreach by government and will backfire on any Democrats voting for it.

One of the issues which is emerging, which I frankly had known nothing about until the last few days, is something called the Equality Act. It hasn’t come up for a vote in the Senate but every Democrat Senator running for re-election has co-sponsored it. So what is the Equality Act? And it actually should be more accurately called the “government imposition of transgenderism act.” And when you read the details, or you look at the analysis, for example, by the Catholic bishops, it’s astonishing.

You can’t quite imagine how anybody in America could be offering this. It would impose the full power of government so that, for example, a student who didn’t use the right pronoun, could in fact, be forced into counseling without their parents being told it.

The Act describes some 21 different areas of the federal government that will be changed to impose support for and recognition of transgenderism as a dominant way of thinking about things.

It resembles what’s happening in Vermont, where a group of high school girls objected to a boy who had declared he was female (although he was still male) and didn’t want to, in fact, change clothes in the same dressing room with him. They were all punished for being discrimination. He was then given the entire dressing room for himself. And the girls were given a very tiny room that they could use one by one in order to change. And several of the girls may in fact be attacked by the school board for having bullied this young man who wants to be a girl, but is not a girl — he’s still a man.

This whole policy area is disliked deeply by most Americans, but seems to be at the very center of the Democratic Party, and seems to be something they can’t get away from. In case after case after case, they are moving to impose the power of government, and of course, the elites are going right along with them. And I think you’re going to find that this conversation is going to grow very dramatically. And I think you’re gonna find that most Americans, when they’re told that the Biden administration has a proposal that students could be basically retrained without telling their parents if they use the wrong language, or if they have the wrong attitude — I think you’re gonna find the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to the government brainwashing their children.

And all this is being driven by some kind of transgender agenda, that frankly, I don’t understand the depth of it, without in any way discriminating against individual people who may go through that value structure. The idea that you would then impose it on the entire society strikes me as an extraordinary overreach and one which is going to blow up in the face of those who want to use government to coerce the rest of us into doing what they want.