The heat is coming early to Indiana this year.
In the form of a new law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act …
A law that has drawn national attention and the ire of the LGBT community.
Without getting into the contortions of how the law is supposed to work, or might work…
The effect can be, and most likely will be, to sanction religiously motivated discrimination against gay people.
The example that’s continually used is where a christian wedding cake baker refuses to provide service for a same-sex wedding.
But real world situations are far more expansive and potentially pernicious than that already worn-out hypothetical.
Now, I believe it’s fairly clear that when it comes to “protected classes”, one cannot use religious persuasion as an excuse to discriminate.
The Jim Crow laws in the south from reconstruction until the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 65, were, at least in part, and I’d even argue at their heart, religiously motivated.
The problem is that in many states, Indiana included, sexual orientation is not a protected class.
This new law is a backhanded attempt to take advantage of that, in favor of religious persuasion…
and, let’s face it, primarily christian religious persuasion.
Many are trying to make this a political issue, or a religious issue…
To me, it’s simply a human rights issue.
It comes down to this…
The argument that the LGBT community should be denied protected class status is one purely based on religion…
Due to the fact that there’s this ancient text of dubious sources containing a few scattered sentences condemning homosexuality as a sinful choice.
And to deny protected class status on that basis is to allow religion to exert far too much influence on how we govern our affairs…
to allow it to rise to the level of an “establishment”, which our First Amendment clearly prohibits.
That is, when religious influence of a particular persuasion begins to undergird the very laws we enact to govern ourselves…well, we got a real constitutional problem on our hands.
But constitutional arguments aside…
I believe we should step back, remove the impact blinders of religion and politics, and ask ourselves what is the impact on PEOPLE here…
Simply put, what’s the right thing to do?
You see the LGBT community is comprised of decent, loving, hardworking, intelligent, creative, beautiful people…some of whom are even religious themselves…
Yet they have endured and continue to endure discrimination, sometimes brutally.
How can that be justified?
When a group of people, who are the way they are because, well, “god” made them that way,…
are routinely and viciously discriminated against, very often due to religious motivations…
why shouldn’t they be deemed a protected class?
Of course, they should!
In fact, many states have already taken such action. Indiana happens to not be one of them…which is very sad.
Good people will be hurt.
Ask a black person who endured discrimination back in the Jim Crow days how it felt.
Nobody should have to endure that…for any reason.
And all this political mumbo jumbo is just a distraction, or red herring…