Guest Post By Tad Cronn

Democrats on the floor of the House of Representatives yelled, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” after Republicans narrowly defeated the latest effort to force LGBTQ “rights” on the nation.

On Thursday, the vote was held on a legislative amendment, proposed by  Rep.[score] Sean Maloney[/score] , to strip away religious freedom protections included in a defense authorization bill passed the day before.

The authorization passed Wednesday included a provision that religious corporations, associations and institutions that receive federal contracts can’t be discriminated against on the basis of religion.

What seems reasonable to people who still believe in the Bill of Rights is totally unacceptable to the Left, so Maloney submitted an amendment that would prohibit funds to any contractor that doesn’t march in lockstep with President Obama’s unconstitutional executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against homosexual and cross-dressing workers.

What really got the LGBTQers worked up, though, was that they thought they had this one in the bag, only to lose it by the slimmest margin at the last second.

When the voting period was closed, Maloney’s unconstitutional amendment upholding President Obama’s unconstitutional executive order appeared to have won, 217-206 in favor.

House rules, however, allow members to change their vote between the time the voting is supposedly closed and the time a bill’s passage or failure is declared, and that’s just what happened.

At least six Republicans changed their votes, while Democrats as usual voted like a synchronized swimming team. The final total was 213-212 against, defeating Maloney’s amendment by one vote. Somehow, in addition to changing votes, both parties picked up a vote before the result was declared. The Republicans added seven to the “nay” total, but only lost six from the “yea” column. Democrats added a single “yea.”

Most mainstream media outlets, such as Reuters, are reporting this as “Republicans defeat LGBT civil rights,” but the real story here is different.

“This is one of the ugliest episodes I’ve experienced in my three-plus years as a member of this House,” Maloney said when he submitted his amendment. This was before the Thursday vote, and he was referring to the language in the defense bill passed Wednesday that overturned Obama’s unconstitutional executive order and prevented contractors from being discriminated against on the basis of religion.

The LGBTQ crowd don’t want you to think about it, but theirs is a religious viewpoint — a worldview in which either the merely material nature of the universe or the morally malleable character of a supreme being means there is no prohibition against a man behaving like a woman or vice versa. And its a religious viewpoint that they’ve been able to persuade enough people to adopt that they now feel confident that they can make it the law of the land.

But two things stand in the way of that achievement — anyone (mostly Christians) whose own religious views run counter to LGBTQ nihilism, and that pesky legal concept of religious liberty, in which no single religion can dominate others or be turned into the official state religion (which is really what LGBTQers want).

So despite the protestations of Democrats like [score]Nancy Pelosi[/score] , and the left-wing media, that homosexual rights are being violated, the truth is that Thursday’s vote, however it was achieved, was a vote that narrowly preserved those religious liberties that never should have been put to a vote in the first place.

Crossposted from Constitution.com