CONCLUSION

As noted repeatedly throughout these Views, Committee Republican Members strongly oppose intentional discrimination in the workplace. We also believe the protections found in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to be, on balance, sufficient for guarding against such discrimination. We therefore find H.R. 3685, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, to be unnecessary in the first instance. Moreover, we find many of the bill's provisions, and the policy questions they raise, to be troubling. Among its more obvious flaws, the bill fails to provide an adequate exemption for religious organizations, including many faith-based educational institutions. It also includes questionable protections based on `perceived' sexual orientation, which will result in great uncertainty as to the meaning and application of this term, leading to costly and unnecessary litigation. The bill also precludes employers from regulating workplace conduct, despite the lack of evidence supporting the need for such a provision and the adverse impact on employers' ability to institute policies for the benefit of companies and their workers. Finally, the bill fails to provide a proper balance with respect to retaliation, unfairly according protections to one class of employees but not others. In every instance, Republican Members offered viable and entirely reasonable proposals to address these concerns. Unfortunately, those proposals were rejected by the Majority. The result of these legislative machinations is a bill that, however well-intended, favors a certain protected class of individual over other classes already protected under current civil rights law, and over individuals with sincerely-held moral and religious beliefs. It is for these reasons that Republicans opposed the bill during its consideration by the Committee on Education and Labor, and why we urge its defeat when considered by the full House of Representatives.
Howard P. `Buck' McKeon.
Pete Hoekstra.
Mark Souder.
Joe Wilson.
John Kline.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
Tom Price.
C. W. Boustany, Jr.
David Davis.
Tim Walberg.