(LifeSiteNews) — A Christian bookstore filed a lawsuit on Wednesday challenging a Colorado law that forces “public accommodations” to refer to people according to their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
As Christians, the owners of Born Again Used Books in Colorado Springs subscribe to the belief derived not only from Scripture, but from scientific fact, that God created humans “male and female.” Thus, “the bookstore won’t ignore biological reality by using pronouns or honorifics that are inconsistent with a person’s sex,” explained Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the bookstore owners in the lawsuit.
In addition, the bookstore desires to publish and share with its customers its Christian (and scientific) views on gender’s inseparability from biological sex. However, the business now faces hefty fines if it publishes these views or contradicts a customer’s “gender identity” by verbally referencing their biological sex.
This is because the recently passed HB25-1312 amends the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (“CADA”) to define “gender expression” as including one’s “chosen name” and “how an individual chooses to be addressed.”
This means that “public accommodations and advertising” that do not adhere to the desires of a gender-confused individual can now be considered guilty of discrimination under CADA, unless the requested language is “offensive” or made for “frivolous purposes.”
The plaintiffs maintain, then, that Colorado law now forces the Christian bookstore to “abandon its core religious beliefs,” and by doing so violates the First Amendment.
“This puts Born Again Used Books under immediate threat. Every day customers visit the store. Every day, Born Again Used Books must refrain from formalizing and distributing its pronoun policy and explaining its beliefs about gender identity. Every day, Born Again Used Books faces liability for following its religious beliefs. And every day, Born Again Used Books chills its expression to avoid violating the law,” the lawsuit states.
Colorado currently has some of the most radical gender ideology laws on the books. One recent law, HB25-1312, dubbed the “Kelly Loving Act” establishes that courts, “when making child custody decisions,” shall consider “deadnaming” (referring to a child by their given name instead of their self-chosen name), and “misgendering” as” types of coercive control.”
It is a dictate of left-wing ideology that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception that individuals are free to change at will. But, as biology attests, sex is not a subjective sense of self but an objective scientific reality, established by an individual’s chromosomes from their earliest moments of existence and reflected by hundreds of genetically based characteristics.
Yet for years LGBT activists have worked to promote “gender fluidity,” the idea that sexual identity is separate from biology and discernible only by personal perception, across public education, libraries, health care, and cultural traditions such as school homecomings and athletic competitions.
Critics warn that their efforts have yielded a wide array of harms, both to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals themselves as well as to the rights, health, and safety of those who disagree, such as girls and women forced to share intimate facilities with males, female athletes forced to compete against males with natural physical advantages, and individuals forced to affirm false sexual identities in violation of their consciences, their understanding of scientific fact, and/or their religious beliefs.
