Elise Stefanik Drops Support for Fairness for All Act

H ouse Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik has dropped her support for the Fairness for All Act (FFAA), National Review has learned. As the third-ranking House Republican, the New York lawmaker was likely the most prominent cosponsor for FFAA, an all-Republican bill that would write sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) into U.S. civil-rights law. Her withdrawal of support, which occurred during last night’s procedural vote, deals another heavy blow to the proposed legislation’s already-beleaguered cause.

FFAA was initially pitched by its backers as a “compromise” between LGBT rights and religious liberty, pairing government protections for gay and transgender citizens with modest “right to discriminate” carve-outs for certain religious institutions. Until recently, that proposed arrangement seemed to be gaining momentum. When it was first introduced by Representative Chris Stewart of Utah at the end of 2019, FFAA had eight cosponsors. By November 2021, it had 22.

Today, however, that momentum seems to have reversed. As of this writing, Stefanik is the third and highest-ranking cosponsor to have withdrawn support for FFAA. She joins Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who quietly withdrew his support on November 30, and Claudia Tenney of New York, who dropped off the bill on February 2.

The decline in enthusiasm for the bill occurs against the backdrop of heavy censure from some corners of the Right, as National Review has previously reported. FFAA’s incorporation of SOGI into federal anti-discrimination law was criticized by influential social conservatives like Ryan T. Anderson and Robert George, and was opposed by conservative and religious groups from the Heritage Foundation to the United States Council of Catholic Bishops. (Although some religious institutions — most notably, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — supported the legislation). It was also widely criticized in conservative media. In November, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles slammed the bill’s Republican cosponsors as “tone-deaf and rudderless.”

More recently, the American Principles Project (APP), a social-conservative advocacy group that has been at the forefront of the transgenderism fight, went so far as to announce plans to back primary challenges to some of FFAA’s Republican sponsors in the upcoming election cycle. “We want to start collecting some scalps, particularly from within the Republican Party,” Terry Schilling, the president of APP, told NR last month. “We want to make [FFAA] a litmus test.”

Now, Schilling celebrates the drop-off in Republican support for FFAA as an indication of a broader shift in the party, telling NR that “the tide is turning for social conservatives.” He also maintains FFAA’s stalling-out points to a deeper shift in the Republican outlook on cultural issues. “The political ground has shifted tremendously as Americans have become more aware of the disastrous consequences of cultural leftism,” he said. “Republicans are finally beginning to realize that fighting on these issues is not only the right thing to do but also will win them elections.”

Conservatives have had little tolerance for Republican concessions on the transgender issue in recent years. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, once a rising star in the GOP, provoked a harsh backlash when she vetoed a bill barring biological male competitors in women’s sports in March 2021. (Noem has since introduced and signed new legislation to the same effect, which she is now touting in an advertisement on prime-time programs across the country). A month later, Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson became the subject of conservative ire for his veto of a bill banning gender-transition surgery for minors. The state legislature ultimately overrode the governor’s veto, making Arkansas the first state to pass such a law.

For social conservatives, the recent GOP departures from FFAA point to an evolution in the thinking of top-ranking Republicans like Stefanik. When the Equality Act — the more radical Democratic alternative to FFAA — passed the House in 2019, eight Republicans, including Stefanik, voted for it. At the time, gender ideology had only just entered the mainstream. But a slate of recent high-profile controversies has forced a reckoning on the issue. The breakdown in sex-based barriers has raised serious concerns about women’s safety, and has enabled biological male predators to commit sexual assaults in a number of traditionally female spaces, from women’s prisons to school bathrooms. On top of that, biological males have outperformed female athletes at both the high school and collegiate levels, with female athletes losing out on lucrative scholarship money, college offers, and other opportunities as a result.

The transgender movement has also become increasingly aggressive in its efforts to silence and persecute dissent. At the behest of activist pressure, Amazon pulled Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally and disallowed sponsored advertisements for Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, both of which were targeted for their criticisms of gender ideology. Amazon has since reversed its ban on advertisements for Shrier’s book, but it maintains that it will not sell When Harry Became Sally, stating that “we have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness” — a framing that Anderson says his book does not take. Target, too, removed Irreversible Damage and Dr. Debra Soh’s transgender-critical The End of Gender from its online store in response to Twitter complaints. The company, which supports the Equality Act and opposes bans on gender-transition surgeries for minors, reversed its decision in the face of backlash the next day, but subsequently re-reversed and quietly removed both books from its website.

Private citizens have also been the target of transgender activists: Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who served as the defendant in the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court case for refusing to bake a cake celebrating same-sex marriage, was punitively fined for refusing to make a transgender-themed cake in 2021. Peter Vlaming, a high-school teacher in Virginia, was fired for refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns. A different Virginia school placed a gym teacher on leave for a similar offense, although the decision was eventually reversed in court.

All this has engendered a sense of urgency in many conservative circles. It also seems to have initiated introspection on the part of at least some Republicans. “Republicans like Elise Stefanik, Claudia Tenney, and Jeff Van Drew are wisely following the will of their constituents by withdrawing their support from the LGBT agenda,” Schilling told NR.

Anderson concurs. “The so-called ‘Fairness for All’ Act has never been about fairness. Attaching religious-liberty protections to bad legislation doesn’t turn it into good legislation,” he told NR. “Kudos to Representative Stefanik for realizing it was a mistake to cosponsor this and for having the courage to drop off.”

Not everyone in the party has adjusted to the new political and cultural moment, of course. Representative Stewart — who told NR that FFAA’s critics were “just wrong” and were “ignor[ing] the overall good it does” in November — still supports the bill, as does every other cosponsor save Van Drew, Tenney, and Stefanik. Stewart and 18 of his fellow cosponsors did not respond to NR’s request for comment. The office of Mark Amodei, an FFAA cosponsor from Nevada’s second congressional district, expressed interest in discussing the legislation, but could not find time to do so before this article was published.

Top Republicans like Stefanik should be commended for their willingness to reconsider the implications of legislation like FFAA. But “for those in the GOP still resisting the obvious, we have only one message,” Schilling said. “Join our side, or you will be voted out.”