Congress should pass appropriations bills that don’t restrict legal rights for Americans, says the Oklahoma congressman who is now leading the fight to protect religious freedom from a coalition of liberal Republican and Democratic legislators. “My hope would be that we could run clean appropriations,” said Rep. Stephen Russell (R.-Okla.). “My efforts have been about protecting the 1st Amendment and the free exercise of religion” from legislators who would restrict religious rights to favor sexual minorities, he said. This year, Democrats — and some Republicans — are trying to raise the legal status of transgenderism in American law. Their goal is to pressure Americans to accept the idea that any man or women can choose the “gender identity” of the opposite sex. That push has sparked fights this year over bathroom privacy in North Carolina, and also in K-12 schools around the nation. Russell passed his own amendment April 28 to the House’s version of the Pentagon budget, effectively shielding federal contractors — who include religious corporations, religious associations, religious educational institutions, and religious societies — from Obama’s Executive Order 13672. The executive order effectively forces contractors to comply with the Employment Non-Discrimination Act or ENDA, which has been repeatedly