Move over Pat McCrory, there’s a new alpha douche-canoe in the old Confederacy and his laws are way worse than yours.
Mississippi’s notorious H.B. 1523 — the so-called Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act — was signed into law by Republican Gov. Phil Bryant, putting on the books a law considered to be “the nation’s worst piece of anti-LGBT legislation.” The move bolsters Mississippi’s claim to the Bigotry Throne, challenging such mainstay heavyweights as Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Alabama.
While Gov. Bryant, in his infinite backwoods wisdom, states the purpose of H.B. 1523 is “to protect sincerely held religious beliefs and moral convictions of individuals, organizations, and private associations from discriminatory action by state government or its political subdivisions,” detractors, including Freedom for All Americans executive director Matt McTighe, state that H.B. 1523 exists for the purpose of “denying critical protections and enabling discrimination against LGBT individuals.”
One thing everyone can agree on, however, is that this new law works as a flux capacitor, allowing the state of Mississippi to travel back in time to a period in its illiberal history when the Ole Miss football team could actually win a National Championship.
In a statement regarding H.B. 1523, Gov. Bryant claimed the law “merely reinforces the rights which currently exist to the exercise of religious freedom as stated in the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” a moronic statement that can only be answered with a “how so?” Considering further that Constitutional scholars and Supreme Court decisions contend that the religious clauses of the First Amendment are in conflict with each other, in terms of application and interpretation, Gov. Bryant could argue that Mississippi’s “screw the gays” law is for the purpose of clarifying the First Amendment.
But at the same time, when looking at what is afforded under H.B. 1523, it’s far more difficult to make the case that the Mississippi legislature is protecting the religious interests of its citizens than it is to point out that Gov. Bryant just made a law out of the wet dreams of his anti-LGBT constituents’ bastardized interpretation of the Biblical Old Testament (you know, the one that some claim was invalidated by Jesus when it is used to point out the inconsistency in Christian bigotry). If they are “protecting the interests” of Mississippians with the law, then logically, the interests of Mississippians must be based in the aforementioned bastardized interpretation of Old Testament scripture, which amounts to making bigoted laws to satiate the bigoted ideals of Mississippi’s bigots.
Under the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act:
“The sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that:
(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;
(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and
(c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.”
Some of these “protected religious interests” include:
- Religious organizations can decline to perform, or provide any services related to, marriages based on religious attitudes.
- Religious organizations can practice discriminatory hiring, discipline an employee, or terminate an employee based on religious attitudes.
- Religious organizations can choose not to rent, sell, or otherwise provide domiciles based on religious attitudes.
- Religious organizations that provide adoptive or fostering services can decline someone based on religious attitudes.
- Foster parents can impose their religious ideals on foster children.
- Any person, even medical professionals, can refuse treatment, counseling, or surgery related to gender-reassignment and same-sex parenting.
- Any person can establish “sex-specific standards or policies concerning employee or student dress or grooming.”
- Any person can manage the access of restrooms and other sex-segregated facilities.
- All state employees can openly express their religious beliefs, even while working in a state capacity, if they wish.
- All state employees can decide not to authorize marriage licences by recusing themselves from those duties.
Mississippi has covered all of the bases, establishing portions of the new law relative to sources of controversy that have brewed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges last June. What’s staggering about this is that even though the term “religious organizations” is used with regularity through the document, corporate entities are “people,” notably with “religious beliefs” (thanks to Hobby Lobby v. Burwell). They could easily fall under “religious organizations” and allow businesses to make these same discriminatory decisions, effectively turning Mississippi into a land where being non-heterosexual makes one a second-class citizen, completely segregated from what Mississippi considers mainstream society.
Holy shit! This is Gay Jim Crow!
Starting July 1, so long as “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions” are cited, LGBT Mississippians can be denied marriage licenses and wedding ceremonies, lose their jobs, lose their homes, and be denied the gamut of services, including public accommodation, solely on the ideological basis of a religious population’s confusion and prejudice toward the manner in which they live, which itself is based on an interpretation of a 2,000 year old text that forms part of the holy book for a religion devoted to a bipolar deity that no one can empirically prove exists.
The reason why the United States was founded as a secular society was because the architects of this nation were astutely aware that things like this are a byproduct of religion as government. Allowing a religious group, however mainstream, to freewheel the judgmental finger of God is the same as allowing them to make the laws themselves, which is the definition of religion as government. Furthermore, if this kind of ideological freedom were awarded to atheists, for example, religious Mississippians would lose their shit and raise 9,000 kinds of holy hell and if this kind of ideological freedom were granted to Muslims, Donald Trump would win every Presidential vote in Mississippi until whenever Jesus is alleged to come back.
Who knows, maybe with this callback to the “good ‘ol days” of segregation, Ole Miss’ all-heterosexual football team will win another National Championship.
Featured image via Pixabay, available under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
