The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) has announced its legislative agenda for 2011.
The agenda outlined covers a wide variety of issues, including:
• Codification of the Mexico City Policy, which previously barred federal money for organizations that perform or promote abortions overseas. President Obama used his executive power to rescind the policy.
• Passage of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.
• Enactment of a ban on federal funds for Planned Parenthood, the country’s No. 1 abortion provider and leading recipient of Title X family planning money.
• Repeal of last year’s health-care law and replacement with a “realistic alternative.”
• Ratification of a constitutional amendment to define marriage as only between a man and a woman.
• Resistance to efforts to promote the homosexual agenda, including the Employment Non-discrimination Act, which would add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to a list of characteristics an employer cannot consider in hiring, firing and promotion decisions. It would expand the list that currently includes race, color, religion, sex and national origin.
• Passage of a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget limited to 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, with exceptions for war and other crises.
• Exposure of attempts at administrative overreach by the president and federal agencies to institute policies when the administration’s legislative efforts fail.
• Continuation of attempts to help focus attention on and provide relief for persecuted Christians and others around the world.
• Defeat of such proposed treaties in the United Nations (U.N.) as the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the U.N. Defamation of Religions resolution.
• Action by the Obama administration to distribute congressionally approved funds to organizations able to implement technology to break Internet firewalls set up in totalitarian states.
The ERLC’s legislative agenda may be accessed online at http://erlc.com/article/legislative-agenda-for-2011/. (BP)
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