A diverse group of religious leaders from across Texas are banding together to oppose the so-called bathroom bill, which would restrict transgender bathroom use.
“It just feels mean and discriminatory and based on nothing but people’s unfounded fear. There is no statistic to prove that show monitoring who is going into what bathroom is going to make anybody safe,” Rabbi Mara Nathan, of San Antonio’s Temple Beth-El, tells Newsradio 1200 WOAI.
The bill, pushed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is sold as a Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
She doesn’t see it that way, and take offense to people using faith to oppress a minority.
“Any time that someone uses religion as an excuse to put people down, I don’t believe that they are fulfilling the core message of what Judaism, or Christianity or Islam or any other faith has as their core belief,” she explains.
Rabbi Mara will be joined, today, by religious leaders from Baptist, Methodist and Protestant churches from Dallas, Houston and Austin, protesting the plan. The rally comes on the same day that Lt. Gov. Patrick is set to take his pitch to a policy briefing for conservative pastors in Austin.
The Religious Freedom Restoration label is applied because several states, not Texas, have take aggressive action against, for example, bakers and florists who have declined to provide products and services for same sex marriages, arguing that the practice violates their religious beliefs.
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