An initiative to grant new legal recognition to people in Anchorage who identify themselves as gay or transgender will appear on the April 3 ballot.
On Dec. 14, Anchorage City Clerk Barbara Gruenstein affirmed that enough signatures have been gathered to place the following question to voters:
"Shall the current municipal code sections providing legal protections against discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, national origin, marital status, age, physical disability, and mental disability be amended to include protections on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender identity?"
Religious liberty groups, however, are already raising concerns about the impact that the proposed law would have on faith-based institutions and nonprofits in Anchorage.
The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a national organization that coordinates legal defenses of religious freedom issues across the country, has analyzed the proposed Anchorage law and found it to substantially undermine religious liberty and conscious protections.
In particular the ADF notes that the current Anchorage Municipal Code does not contain an adequate religious exemption to the proposed law. The group explains that the code does not protect religiously motivated employees, business owners or professionals — all groups with which the initiative is most likely to cause religious-liberty conflicts.
The ADF also notes that the current exemption "does not even adequately protect religious organizations."
"Rather than exempting all acts of a religious organization, the exemption only applies when the challenged conduct is 'reasonably calculated to promote the religious principles for which it is established or maintained,'" the ADF observes. "This type of exemption requires courts to determine whether the challenged conduct is sufficiently connected to the organization's religious mission."
This will require judges to "evaluate sensitive religious matters outside their legitimate scope of authority," the ADF adds, and it will impose a "significant burden on all religious organizations by requiring them to predict whether a court will consider their activities to be sufficiently connected to their religious mission to qualify for the exemption."
The initiative is similar to a proposed city ordinance that the Anchorage Assembly passed in 2009 and which Mayor Dan Sullivan vetoed.
This article was originally published in The Catholic Anchor and is reprinted here with permission.