A homeless shelter serving battered and sexually abused women in Anchorage, Alaska is being targeted by the state’s equal rights commission for refusing to allow biological men into the shelter’s shower and living facilities.
The nonprofit, Downtown Hope Center, has been under “investigation” for months after a homeless man named Timothy Coyle, who identifies as a female named Samantha Coyle, filed a complaint with the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission for alleged discrimination.
Coyle showed up at the center on the night of January 18 after he was kicked out of a neighboring shelter for physical violence. Since Coyle was drunk and injured, Hope Center Director Sherrie Laurie sent him to the hospital and kindly paid for his transportation.
Since the charitable center is not a “public accommodation” and should be awarded an accommodation rooted in religious liberty because it is a faith-based shelter, an attorney for Hope Center tried to get the outlandish complaint dismissed.
But the commission refused to drop the complaint and insisted on attempting to force the homeless shelter to allow men into living facilities where women who just escaped the horrors of sexual abuse reside. To make matters worse, Hope Center was forced to go silent and seek new counsel after their lawyer spoke to the media about the facts of the case. This was apparently in violation of an anti-discrimination law, per the commission.
The center is fighting back, however. On Thursday, Downtown Hope Center filed a complaint against the Municipality of Anchorage and Anchorage Equal Rights Commission. The charity is being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the organization behind vital religious liberty suits like Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra.
“This challenge seeks to protect the right of a faith-based homeless shelter to exercise its religious beliefs and to speak about those beliefs so that it can help homeless and hurting women in downtown Anchorage,” reads the complaint. “But [Municipality of Anchorage] is interpreting its laws to force the Hope Center to admit men into its women’s shelter and to stay silent about the differences between men and women. That violates Anchorage’s own laws and the Constitution.”
The complaint notes that an enforcement of such “anti-discrimination” policies would “force homeless women to sleep alongside and interact with men in intimate settings—even though those women may have just been beaten, raped, and sexually assaulted by a man the day before.”
Hope Center argues that the municipality “is harassing the Hope Center in bad faith, pressuring the Hope Center to
change its policy and to stay silent when the Hope Center has done nothing illegal.”
“These investigations prove that Anchorage is using its law—a law which contains an express exemption for homeless shelters—and will continue to use this law in the future to force the Hope Center to change its faith-based policies, to allow biological men into its women’s shelter, and to stay silent about its religious beliefs,” states the complaint.