Guest Post: ACLU Tries to Use Court to Impose Values on Private Company in Idaho


From Bryan Fischer, Idaho Values Alliance
The ACLU, never content to allow public policy to be established by our elected representatives, is now threatening to go to court to force a private company doing business in Idaho to violate its own policies for employees.
The situation involves an employee of the Konica Minolta company, which provides benefits to “domestic partners” in states which have a domestic partner registry. This employee has a same-sex “domestic partner,” who was covered as long as the couple lived in New Jersey.
But they have since moved to Idaho, where voters enacted the Marriage Amendment in 2006 with 63% of the vote, an amendment which prohibits the state from recognizing civil unions or domestic partnerships.
The company’s policy is quite clear, saying that eligibility is restricted to homosexual couples who “obtain a certificate of registration of domestic partnership from the state or municipality in which he or she resides.” This, of course, cannot happen in Idaho.
The ACLU has sent a “demand letter” to the company, insisting that it violate its own company policy by giving benefits to this same-sex couple, benefits they are not legally entitled to.
Notice it is a “demand” letter, coming from an organization that it always telling us how wrong it is to force moral views down other people’s throats. Apparently the ACLU has carved out an exception for itself, and has no problem using activist courts to cram its own moral views down the throats even of private companies.
The letter contains an implied threat of a lawsuit, which the ACLU helpfully reminds the company will be filed in the Ninth Circuit, the most notoriously liberal Court of Appeals in the country. In going to court, they are trying to get a judge to force private companies doing business in Idaho to have their policies dictated to them by the government of New Jersey. So much for the United States as a “laboratory of democracy.”
The ACLU apparently looks at our state constitution as an inconvenience which can be swatted away or ignored at any place it serves as a check on the radical homosexual agenda. The ACLU is intent on forcing society to endorse and legitimize homosexual relationships as the moral equivalent of normal marriages whether that represents the will of the people or not.
This story has received considerable attention in the national gay press.
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Posted in Constitutional Issues, Family Matters, Guest Posts, Idaho Legislature | No Comments »