President Donald Trump’s new executive order declaring that there are only two genders does much more than restore objective truth to government policy. It protects every church, college, and charity that defends this truth. 

On Jan. 20, one of the very first actions of Trump’s second term was to make it federal policy that the government is only to consider biological sex — not gender identity — in everything from passports to public bathrooms to prison placement. 

While most Republicans are celebrating that this mandate keeps boys out of girls’ restrooms and limits the number of genders listed on federal IDs, most commenters miss something just as important. 

The executive order changes the federal government’s policy for application of the 2020 Supreme Court case, Bostock v. Clayton County. The court ruled that, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, private employers must allow people into single-sex spaces that align with their gender identity. 

The Civil Rights Act makes no mention of gender identity, but the Supreme Court ruled that Title VII’s prohibition of sex-based discrimination applies to gender. Trump has clarified that government agencies are not to include any subjective gender-based ideology in their enforcement of the law. 

Now the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces the anti-discrimination laws in the private sector, cannot punish employers for normal policies like sex-specific bathrooms that the EEOC could label as discrimination.

This matters most when it applies to churches, religious schools, and charities. 

Currently, the government labels all of these as “charitable institutions,” which gives them 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. However, they might not stay that way forever. 

In 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke said at a town hall in Los Angeles, California, that any college, church, or charity that opposes same-sex marriage should lose its tax-exempt status. He was met with thundering applause, and other candidates like Senator Cory Booker echoed similar sentiments. 

All it would take to treat every church and religious school in America like any other business is to remove their status as a charitable institution on the basis of “discriminatory action,” which the Supreme Court has ruled is legal. Not only would many of those institutions be bankrupted by having to pay taxes without making profit, under the 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County case, the EEOC could also sue any and every Christian institution in America that teaches that the gender-identity ideology is wrong under the Civil Rights Act.  

This is the real importance of Trump’s executive order. 

To specify that the actual government policy does not consider gender-identity addresses the ambiguity that the Supreme Court saw under sex-based discrimination in the Civil Rights Act. Since the court’s job is to interpret the law, not to make it, the precedent from the Bostock v. Clayton County case is essentially overturned. 

Furthermore, the executive order lays out a plan to put the definitions of “sex,” “man,” “woman,” “female,” and “male,” as well as the way federal agencies are to use them, into a bill that is to be presented before Congress. Trump is using the Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives to give this policy the best possible chance at becoming a permanent law. 

The reason a bill would be important is that executive orders can simply be overturned by the next administration. While this executive order is a great start, the job is not finished yet.

Passing that piece of legislation would be one of the best things the Trump administration could do for the Christians who voted for him. The real long-term threat to religious freedom in the United States is that a misinterpretation of the Civil Rights Act could prevent religious institutions from following their religion.

Some people may say the government would never come after American churches and religious schools, but only five years ago, a Democratic presidential candidate campaigned on that policy and garnered some support for it. While that support was not enough to win then, it could be in the future.

It sounds outrageous now, when public sentiment in America is opposed to the gender ideology that has been so prevalent and powerful in the last decade. That will not last forever. Eventually, the pendulum will swing back. The more protections for religious freedom that the Trump administration can put in place now, the better.

 

Luke Miller is a sophomore studying political economy.