A Republican candidate for a congressional House seat in North Carolina invoked Oskar Schindler during an email exchange about enforcing and protecting the freedom of religion.
Dan Bishop, currently a state senator, was discussing with conservative activists how to minimize the 2017 partial repeal of the state’s “bathroom bill,” which determined that people must use the bathroom associated with their gender, and not their “gender identity.”
In the emails obtained by Real Facts NC, a liberal nonprofit, Bishop expressed support for an exemption to allow small businesses to refuse “creative” services to LGBTQ people — such as in the case that saw a Colorado baker refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex couple.
When one conservative activist asked which types of business owners Bishop was seeking to protect, he responded by referencing Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust.
“As Oscar (sic) Schindler said, as many as we can,” Bishop wrote in response.
Schindler, whose story was memorialized in Steven Spielberg’s 1994 film “Schindler’s List,” worked to save as many Jews as he could by hiring them to work in his factories so they could avoid being deported to death camps.