Republican Likens His Anti-LGBTQ Work to Oskar Schindler Saving Jews
The Republican candidate in a special congressional election in North Carolina has equated his anti-LGBTQ activism with the work of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved the lives of Jews during the Holocaust.
State Sen. Dan Bishop, who was the architect of North Carolina’s infamous House Bill 2, the 2016 legislation that restricted transgender people’s restroom access and rescinded LGBTQ rights protections generally, made the Schindler comparison in an email to Kellie Fiedorek, a lawyer with the anti-LGBTQ Alliance Defending Freedom, HuffPost reports. Bishop was seeking to add a “conscience” exemptions clause to a bill that repealed several of the provisions of HB 2 in 2017, after Democrat Roy Cooper succeeded Republican Pat McCrory as governor.
They were discussing how broad to make the exemption, which was designed to shield business operators from discrimination complaints if they had religious or moral objections to serving same-sex couples or other LGBTQ customers. “Whom are we attempting to protect here? Just creative professionals?” Fiedorek asked in an email obtained by a website called Real News NC. Bishop replied, “As Oskar Schindler said, as many as we can.” Ultimately, the repeal bill that passed did not include the clause.
Schindler saved more than 1,000 Jews from being sent to concentration camps by employing them at his factories during World War II. He protected them by saying they were essential to the war effort and also by often bribing German officials. Considered a “righteous Gentile” by Jews, he was made world-famous by Thomas Keneally’s historical novel Schindler’s List, adapted into the Oscar-winning 1993 Steven Spielberg movie of the same name.
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