CV NEWS FEED // On May 9, the Connecticut House of Representatives passed a bill that would effectively expand the definition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to include “discrimination” against so-called “minor-attracted persons.”
H.B. 6638, also known as “An Act Revising the State’s Antidiscrimination Statutes,” passed by a landslide margin of 132-17, with two members absent from the vote. A significant majority of the state’s 53 House Republicans voted in favor of the bill.
The state’s House Democratic caucus described the bill as seeking to “modernize and improve consistency in” the state’s “discrimination statutes.” The Connecticut American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which supports the bill, used similar language, stating that “it modernizes the existing definition of sexual orientation, moving away from thirty-year-old outdated and offensive terminology.”
However, many critics say that this “updated” definition would by extension allow the state to aid and abet pedophilic predators.
The Family Institute of Connecticut has termed H.B. 6638 the “Pedophile Anti-Discrimination Bill.” One week after the controversial bill passed in the state House, the non-profit stated that if the legislation were enacted, it would change the state’s legal definition of “sexual orientation”
in 2 big ways. It becomes untethered from “heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality” and instead ties to “identity.” Second, it now includes identities whose underlying behavior would be a sex crime.
Untied from the orientations of “heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality” the law will be changed to prevent discrimination of any “identity”. Identities related to any romantic, emotional or sexual attraction towards a gender.
Therefore, the Family Institute of Connecticut argues that “even people with sexual attractions like pedophilia and nepiophilia would be protected from discrimination,” although “the associated behavior” would remain criminal, because the bill “would not legalize those crimes.”
Despite conceding that the bill does not go as far as to make pedophilia legal in Connecticut, the nonprofit asserts it would make it so
Connecticut citizens and businesses could not deny persons with those professed sexual attractions and identities from working or volunteering in our homes, hospitals, and schools, or otherwise “discriminate” based on those professed attractions.
The bill has yet to be voted on by the state Senate. If it passes in the upper chamber, it will head to the desk of Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont, who has a record of being a consistent promoter of the LGBTQ movement.
