What a shocker! More bad news out of Mississippi regarding civil rights and the equal treatment of
all its citizens. Governor
Phil Bryant, A Republican, signed
House Bill 1523 into law on Tuesday.
The bill, which goes into effect in July, is titled "Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act" and purports to provide people with "sincerely held religious beliefs" the right to deny services and public accommodations to certain people. But it is also to support only
certain religious beliefs, such as:
The act states that the government cannot penalize an individual, organization, or business for acting according to the following "sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions": that "marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman"; that "sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage"; and that "male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth."
It looks flagrantly unconstitutional as well as discriminatory to me. It will be interesting to see if the response to Mississippi's bill mirrors the negative response
North Carolina and
Indiana have received for enacting similiarly bigoted legislation.
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