When The 5th District Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling against Mississippi’s HB1523, also known as “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act,” on Thursday, a lot of folks didn’t know whether to shrug their shoulders or set their hair on fire and run down the street.
So I put the question to Matt Steffey, a professor at Mississippi College School of Law, who teaches classes on the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I’d say more of a shrug,” he said. “For supporters of this law, it’s winning a minor skirmish in a war you’re ultimately going to lose. It’s the worst of many of these types of laws going through the courts now and is clearly unconstitutional.”
Steffey said there is no better indicator of that than the language found in Thursday’s ruling, which he said did not address the real issue at the heart of the law — whether a state can codify into law the tenets of a single religion.
Instead, the 5th Circuit found a way to hand religious conservatives a victory by rejecting the lower court ruling on the basis of a peripheral issue — whether the original plaintiffs had the proper standing to bring the suit.
Despite Thursday’s ruling, there are some procedural moves that could delay the law’s implementation. But since it was already perfectly lawful in “The Hospitality State” to discriminate against LGBTQ people even before HB1523 was written, it’s business as usual.
Yes, Mississippians are free to continue to discriminate against LGBT people if they have a “sincerely held religious belief ” that the Golden Rule is a bunch of hooey.
Hey, I’m not exactly pious, but it strikes me as odd that any Christian would ask permission from the courts NOT to do what their own scriptures expressly tell them TO do — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
In other words, if you want somebody to bake you a cake, put together a floral arrangement or take photos at your wedding, as a good Christian you should be willing to extend that courtesy to others, too.
So I’m with Jesus on this one: To paraphrase Matthew 7:12: Don’t be a jerk.
See this law for what it is: a silly, mean-spirited bit of grand-standing to an ill-informed base.
In that sense, Thursday’s ruling should be greeted more with a shrug than a shriek. But viewed another way, the law does our state real harm.
The Mississippi brand was already bad enough as it was, what with our stubborn devotion to the Confederate symbol in our state flag.
Now, we’ve chosen not only to self-identify with a universally-recognized symbol of racism, we are also embracing homophobia and discrimination. This at a time when our state’s economy is crumbling and state officials are desperate to attract business and industry to come here.
Unless you believe that somewhere in the corporate offices around the world industry executives are muttering, “If only there was a state that embraced a racist symbol while at the same time openly discriminated LGBTQ people!” you must realize the damage this does to our already badly damaged image.
So, yeah, Mississippi “won” its case Thursday, but it’s like blowing the rent money trying to win a stuffed bear at the carnival.
We’ll wind up paying way, way too much for this “victory.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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