Workplace Discrimination: Not What You May Think

By Jeremiah G. Dys, Esq.

Elane Huguenin is the part owner of Elane Photography in Albuquerque, NM.  Recently, a lesbian couple asked Elane to photograph their “commitment ceremony.”  Recognizing that her Christian beliefs would be in conflict with the message communicated by the ceremony, Elane declined their business.

At the beginning of April, a Commissioner with the New Mexico Human Rights Commission ordered Elane to pay $6,637.94 in attorney fees and costs to the lesbian couple who sued Elane Photography for sexual orientation discrimination under the New Mexico Human Rights Act.

Elane has been penalized for simply abiding by her religious beliefs and is now forced – under color of law – to choose between her religious beliefs and her business practice.

During the 2008 session of the West Virginia legislature, our leaders nearly added to West Virginia’s already expansive corporate liability.  S.B. 600 would have made the West Virginia Human Rights and Fair Housing Acts read nearly verbatim to the laws that convicted Elane in New Mexico.

Businesses and families throughout West Virginia should reject bills like S.B. 600.  Though billed as egalitarianism, such “nondiscrimination ordinances” (NO’s) are anything but.  Frankly, Elane’s $6K judgment is paltry by comparison to some.  Consider:

In 1998, employees of a Minnesota business who dared to read their Bibles at work were forced to attend “diversity training,” which was little more than indoctrination by gay rights activists.  It took four (4) years of litigation to vindicate the supposedly inalienable First Amendment freedoms of these employees.

A California company was forced to settle a lawsuit for $1 million and lay off several employees after it was sued under California’s N.O. for failing to promote a man who came dressed to work as a woman. Only after the lawsuit was filed did the company learn that the man was not a woman.

NO’s not only increase the corporate liability for West Virginia companies, they also lead to absurd results.  Under NO’s, companies may be precluded from enforcing dress codes at work, thus allowing men to come to work dressed as women.  Conceivably, employers could not preclude gender-confused employees from using shower and restroom facilities of the opposite gender.

In short, NO’s – whether adopted in the board room, at city hall, or in the capitol – are bad for business and bad for the families of West Virginia.  Such measures will almost certainly result in significant lawsuits against large and small companies throughout the mountain state.

Unless and until it is shown that “sexual orientation” has been the subject of political powerlessness, economic disenfranchisement, and is of an immutable nature, it should not receive the benefit of human and civil rights protection afforded to historically protected classes such as race, gender, age, disability, and religion.

To do otherwise would upend half a century of jurisprudence and penalize our families for abiding by their religious beliefs.

Jeremiah G. Dys, Esq., is the president and general counsel of The Family Policy Council of West Virginia.  Download the Council’s White Paper, “Businesses and S.B. 600” at www.familypolicywv.com.

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United by Family

by Jeremiah G. Dys, Esq.

Politics is an interesting study. Just a few short years ago, you were hearing Democrats proclaim that they were the party of unity. Today, the Democrat party is rather evenly divided between Obama and Clinton.

Meanwhile, Republicans have seemed quite united, but the reality beneath has often shown something else. Economic, military, and moral conservatives were at one time solidly united, but each has fired criticisms with various Republican policies over the past two decades.

There has even been a division among values voters – regardless of party. Last summer, James Dobson voiced his personal inability to cast a ballot for John McCain, “under any circumstances.” Paul Weyrich, conservative mentor of Mike Huckabee, threw in behind Mitt Romney. Former presidential candidate and Reagan aide Gary Bauer has endorsed McCain. Other leaders in the family values movement have all made their endorsements and few of them are the same.

Yet, while the leaders of the Democrat party vie for that party’s future and Republicans begin work once again to unite behind their tepid choice, there is a surprising unity to be found.

Unequivocally, those most concerned about the future of the American family have unified behind the convictions of life, marriage, and religious freedom – party politics aside.

Phil Burress, director of Citizens for Community Values, was quoted in the latest edition of World magazine as saying, “McCain wasn’t my first choice, and I’m not sure about him now, but we’ve got a zero chance of getting a conservative Supreme Court justice out of either Clinton or Obama.” Burress, and many others, is united behind the sanctity of human life.

Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, criticized a recent speech by McCain to family values leaders, wishing the presumptive Republican nominee for president had seized the opportunity to articulate his personal commitment to religious liberty. Perkins has demonstrated his unison for religious freedom.

In Florida and California, petition drives are reaching historic numbers – each signature supporting a ballot measure to clearly define marriage as between “one man and one woman.” Values voters are demonstrating their confederation for marriage.

Regardless of party affiliation, John and Jane Q. Churchgoer are yet unified on the first principles of life, marriage, and religious freedom. Perhaps the winds of the political clime are ever shifting, but the stuff that makes strong families is fixed.

Many West Virginians share this unity for the family. We understand that, without life, we have no family. Absent strong marriages, our families are broken. Unless our religious liberty is strongly safeguarded, our families cannot worship.

And, as a practical matter, these should be unifying issues. Strong families make strong communities. Strong communities support strong states, infusing our businesses with growth and potential for greater economic opportunity.

That is why our families ought to unite behind the family, making it their first priority, not an afterthought.

Jeremiah G. Dys, Esq., is the president and general counsel of The Family Policy Council of West Virginia, a servant organization advocating for policies that embrace the sanctity of human life, enrich marriage, and safeguard religious freedom, www.familypolicywv.com.

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Planned Parenthood: Protecting the Predator

by Jeremiah G. Dys, Esq.

It appears that proponents of abortion on demand - at any time during pregnancy - may have finally gone too far and could pay a devastating price. Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider with 860 clinics around the country, and other late term abortion providers, are under criminal investigation in Kansas.

A multitude of charges on a variety of counts range from providing illegal, late-term abortions to falsifying patient records to cover up illegal activity.

The abortion providers, inexplicably aided to some extent by the Kansas Supreme Court, have taken to hiding behind the notion of “protecting patient privacy” in their attempts to stonewall a pair of grand jury investigations and to thwart the efforts of Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline.

These cases have been quite revealing with regard to how far some people are willing to go to protect late-term abortion on demand.

In Kline’s investigation, four independent judges have found probable cause to believe that abortion clinics in Kansas committed 156 criminal acts based on 90 records that were subpoenaed by a judge.

But the Kansas Supreme Court, in quite the undertaking of judicial activism, has blocked efforts by one of those grand juries to subpoena patient records despite the fact that the names of all adult patients would be removed from the records. Child names would remain as they are the victims of crime and law enforcement must act to protect them.

Law enforcement cannot protect children unless the names of children who are abused are known to law enforcement. This is why we have “mandatory” reporting laws of child sexual abuse. Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline originally sought these names in acting to protect the close to 74 children, 14 years of age and younger, who have abortions every year in that state.

There is, and ought to be, no “right to privacy” for sexual predators who prey upon children by taking them to abort the children of the child they preyed upon!

It is twisted thinking for abortion clinics to encourage sexual predators to simply take their child victims to an abortion clinic. The predators know the clinics will protect them in the name of preserving abortion on demand. Who should they protect? The predator or the prey? Apparently, they are protecting neither.

What is more, Planned Parenthood in West Virginia is using hundreds of thousands of our state tax dollars to permit this. At the very least, our legislators could have used that money to pay for their own pay increase.

If Planned Parenthood, currently facing 107 felony and misdemeanor charges, is found guilty, the verdict could jeopardize its federal (and, one would hope, state) funding. Currently, American taxpayers, through the direction of Congress, fund Planned Parenthood over $300 million each year, over one-third of the organization’s budget.

The confrontation between the rule of law and abortion on demand at any cost at any stage of pregnancy is playing out on the plains of Kansas and just as in the days of bleeding Kansas in the 1800’s over the issue of slavery, so goes Kansas, so goes the nation - West Virginia included.

Jeremiah G. Dys, Esq. is the president and general counsel of The Family Policy Council of West Virginia, a servant organization advocating for policies that embrace the sanctity of human life, enrich marriages, and safeguard religious freedom. On the web at www.familypolicywv.com.

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Not My Charity

By Jeremiah G. Dys, Esq.

On the floor of Congress, the intrepid Congressman David Crockett – the very, “King of the Wild Frontier” – once said, “We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.”

Would that our government heed his wisdom.

Since 1976, the Federal government has showed some common sense by enforcing and upholding the Hyde Amendment, thereby preventing the Federal funding of elective abortions. In 1993, our West Virginia legislature sought to amend our Medicaid program by denying Medicaid dollars for abortions, save under extreme circumstances.

Yet, our Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia decided to create a broader right in our West Virginia Constitution than what Roe and Casey found in the U.S. Constitution. Effectively, our jurists said that our State constitution requires that if the State funds the births of babies born to low-income families, it must also fund their elective abortions.

In other words, if the State funds life, it must also fund death.

Since then our state has been funding abortions to the tune of $350,000 annually – money that is automatically deducted from each of your paychecks.

So, how has your money been spent? Much of that money has gone to Planned Parenthood, which makes over $100 million annually on surgical abortions, which is only a portion of the $300 million annual dollars earned from its clinical operations. All dollars, many would say, have been well-spent to, in the words of Panepinto, “alleviate some of the hardships of poverty.”

But recent news indicates that our tax dollars are being mismanaged. In Kansas, Planned Parenthood – who owns and operates a clinic near Parkersburg, WV – is under criminal indictment. Charged with 107 different violations of Kansas law, Planned Parenthood must answer why it has mismanaged Kansan money.

In Ohio, Planned Parenthood has been sued for failing to comply with reporting requirements, such as informing the authorities about child sex abuse. In California, Planned Parenthood faces a lawsuit for using unlicensed personnel to perform, or assist with, abortions. A former employee of a Chicago Planned Parenthood clinic sued her former employer for changing ultrasound dates in order to make more money from abortions “services.”

Moral arguments aside: would you invest your dollars in an organization with such a sordid history of misappropriation and misinformation?

House Bill 3077 (or Senate Bill 307) would solve that dilemma and your Delegate and Senator ought to be encouraged to support it.

Life a sacred gift and no one should be permitted to decide which life is of more (or less) value. If our leaders, neighbors, or private organizations wish to so invest, then they may. But, in the words of Col. Crockett, government has, “no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.”

Jeremiah G. Dys, Esq. is the Executive Director and General Counsel of the West Virginia Values Coalition, the Family Policy Council of West Virginia, on the web at www.familypolicywv.com.