House Democrats reintroduced their so-called “Equality Act” last week. The bill would add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the protected classes under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, as The Heritage Foundation explains, “Where the original Civil Rights Act of 1964 furthered equality by ensuring that African-Americans had equal access to public accommodations and material goods, the Equality Act would further inequality by penalizing everyday Americans for their beliefs about marriage and biological sex. Similar sexual orientation and gender identity laws at the state and local level have already been used in this way.”

Frankly, the “Equality Act” would step all over Americans’ First Amendment rights. Heritage further highlights five specific groups who would be harmed should the act ever become law: employers and workers, medical professionals, parents and children, women, and nonprofits and volunteers. In other words, the law would directly impact virtually everyone living in America.

This ill-conceived legislation is the kind of heavy-handed, government-forced thinking that many have long warned against. The law would not merely protect those individuals expressing new sexual “norms” or gender “identity” from suffering physical harm; rather it seeks to force all Americans to accept and embrace leftist ideology. It would compel speech. We have already seen examples of this reality, where in Virginia just last year a high-school teacher was fired for his refusal to address a gender-dysphoric individual by her preferred pronoun (him). The teacher argued that to use a pronoun contrary to the biological sex of the student went against his faith, as it would be engaging in a lie. He noted that he believed God created human beings and furthermore determined their biological sex, and therefore the teacher was not free to ignore this reality or pretend otherwise.

Democrats claim the law would ban discrimination, but the reality is that it would simply insert a new and much more dangerous discrimination — a kind of discrimination that runs counter to the Liberty all Americans share under the Constitution. It would effectively create a more “equal” classification of individual whose status would trump the freedom and rights of others. The truth is, this law is not about equality at all; it’s about using the power of government to force others into conforming to the immoral ideals of a protected class. It is in fact evil.