Here’s a story from the UK about the top contender for leadership of the Labour Party, on how far she would take the party to defend transgender rights:

She called for changes to the 2010 Equality Act, which allows exclusions from women-only spaces, saying: “I want a right to self id [identification] for trans people, it’s not an easy journey to go on.”

It was put to Ms Long-Bailey that female victims of domestic violence have spoken of their “debilitating terror” and of the vital importance of a woman-only refuge.

But she replied: “We can’t use that as an argument to discriminate against transpeople.”

The BBC’s Andrew Marr suggested that – if holding such views triggered expulsion – “an awful lot of good feminists inside the Labour party would be caught by this”.

Rebecca Long-Bailey has described as transphobic Women’s Place, a group of Labour feminists who are campaigning to keep women’s domestic violence shelters spaces exclusively for biological women. When called on it by the interviewer, she waffled.

In the interview, asked about Women’s Place, Ms Long-Bailey insisted: “I’m not regarding any particular group as a hate group.”

Mr Marr replied: “You signed something that said so?”

This is something that American journalists ought to put to the Democratic presidential candidates. I don’t expect that they actually will do it, because on LGBT issues, American journalists behave like advocates. Still, it would be really useful to learn precisely where and how the Democrats draw the line on trans rights. All of them have come out in support of the Equality Act, which passed the Democratic-controlled House last year. The bill would expand federal civil rights law to include sexual orientation and gender identity. As ADF Legal has pointed out in its analysis of the bill last year:

Churches, religious schools, and other faith-based organizations that hold beliefs about marriage, sexual morality, and the distinction between the sexes would be punished if they refuse to give up policies and practices reflecting these beliefs.

Unlike many state and local sexual orientation/gender identity (SOGI) laws, the “Equality Act” has absolutely no exemption whatsoever for houses of worship and other religious entities. Even more, the “Equality Act” strips the faithful of the protections they possess under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.

Churches and other religious organizations will violate the “Equality Act” if:

1. they require their employees to refrain from homosexual behavior;
2. they refuse to open up women’s restrooms to men who identify as women;
3. they use pronouns consistent with an employee’s biological sex rather than their professed gender identity; or
4. they refuse to include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and “sex reassignment” surgery in their health plans.

The “Equality Act” will also forbid college students from using their federal tuition assistance at religious educational institutions that “discriminate” on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Schools like Wheaton College, Biola University, and Taylor University will lose federal student aid if they continue to prohibit homosexual behavior or decline to let biological males who identify as women to play on women’s sports teams.

Women’s shelters will lose federal funding if they decline to let biological men who identify as women to share communal sleeping facilities with women, many of whom have been subjected to sexual abuse. Faith-based adoption and foster placement agencies will lose federal funding if they follow their religious beliefs and place children only with married, opposite-sex couples.

The “Equality Act” also would dramatically expand the definition of “place of public accommodation,” thereby subjecting a virtually unlimited number of organizations to new SOGI obligations. Counselors and medical professionals will face potentially ruinous liability if they decline to “affirm” a patient’s gender confusion, including by prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, or performing sex reassignment procedures. That a health care provider might object on religious grounds would be wholly irrelevant.

If you’re a pastor or religious leader, or just a religious person, were you aware of the threat this legislation poses to your liberty? You aren’t if you depend on the mainstream US media to give an analysis of it. ADF Legal is a Christian organization, so naturally it focuses on the religious liberty aspect. Elizabeth Nolan Brown of the libertarian magazine Reason says it’s a big threat to liberty, and she certainly doesn’t say it as any sort of conservative:

Every American should be treated with dignity and respect, but our laws need to protect the Constitutionally guaranteed rights that we have,” the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Greg Baylor said on the Christian Broadcasting Network. If this bill passes, “we will see a proliferation of instances where Christians and others are being coerced to violate their beliefs in order to comply with such a law,” he warned.

At least that much is exceedingly likely. The bill specifically states that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act “shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under” the Equality Act, nor “provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement” of it.

While the worst and most paranoid interpretations of this bill are pure culture war pageantry, there are definite threats to religious and academic freedom. And there are legitimate uncertainties about what legislation like this would mean for the sorts of sex/gender-segregated spaces, services, programs, opportunities, and the like that people of all political persuasions support—the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, women-only co-working spaces, scholarship opportunities that exclude men, and so much more.

There is nothing in the Equality Act that exempts women’s shelters from federal civil rights law. Here’s a link to the text of the bill — see for yourself. Every single one of those Democrats standing for president should have to explain why they have endorsed this bill. Every single one of them should have to explain why being consistent with LGBT ideology is more important to them than the safety and well-being of women who have been beaten or sexually assaulted by males.

Gay conservative Brad Polumbo came out against the Equality Act last year because it goes way too far in demolishing religious liberty and conscience rights. For example, it could force physicians not only to treat trans patients (something that is perfectly fair), but also to provide sex-change surgeries and procedures, which is not. And the Act specifically targets the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, to make it less likely that religious defendants would have a shot at prevailing in court.

This is what we will have if a Democrat becomes president, and the Democrats retain control in the House, and gain it in the Senate. It’s not a “scare tactic” to point this out if it is true. The Democratic Party has lost all common sense on this issue. It is not just a threat to religious liberty, but to the safety of vulnerable abused women. Left-wing political parties in the West have lost their minds on this stuff — and we need journalists like Andrew Marr to put the hard questions to candidates.