America! What a great county. Until we wrote that dumb Constitution, then it was all downhill from there. First it protected gay marriage; now the Constitution’s blocking a law that gives preferential treatment to anti-gay religious beliefs. Who could have guessed that the founding fathers were all a bunch of homosexual sympathizers?
Here’s the backstory: after the federal ruling on the freedom to marry last June, a couple of states tried to pass laws that allow people to disregard marriage equality on the basis of their belief that marriage is between a man and a woman. (Insanely, a few bills go even further, and allow you to discriminate against straight people for having premarital sex.) I host a podcast called Defining Marriage where my partner and I talk about the week’s gay-marriage news, and we’ve laughed at length about how doomed these dumb laws have been from the start.
Now, the latest news is that a judge in Mississippi has ruled what we were all anticipating: No, homophobes, you can’t do that. And he’s done so with some particularly strong language that is sure to freak out the anti-gay right wing.
We have Robbie Kaplan to thank in large part for this victory. She, along with a team of litigators, pushed the Windsor case that laid the groundwork for marriage equality in 2013. She’s also one of the driving forces behind the Mississippi case and she did a fabulous job of dismantling the law before the District Court.
The Mississippi law, and dozens like it, basically let people say “okay, you may be married, but you’re not, like, MARRIED married.” Depending on the state, the laws allow various parties (clerks, private citizens, businesses, bus drivers, etc) to refuse to issue licenses or treat married couples as though they have any legal status other than single. And the laws do this by carving out an exemption: If your religion says that gays shouldn’t marry, well then by gum you can just go on pretending that they haven’t.
A fundamental flaw of these laws — and in hindsight, it’s a real well-duh problem — is that they protect one particular religious belief, elevating it above all others for special legal protection. Whoops. Mississippi musta been so excited about the Second Amendment that they forgot about the very first part of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Oh, right.
“The majority of Mississippians were granted special rights to not serve LGBT citizens,” wrote District Judge Carlton W. Reeves, “and were immunized from the consequences of their actions” by a law that “establishes an official preference for certain religious beliefs over others.”
“Persons who hold contrary religious beliefs are unprotected,” he added. “The State has put its thumb on the scale to favor some religious beliefs over others.”
He also had no patience for the effect of the law: “There are almost endless explanations for how HB 1523 condones discrimination against the LGBT community, but in its simplest terms it denies LGBT citizens equal protection under the law,” Reeves wrote, calling the law “a vehicle for state-sanctioned discrimination.”
This is a big deal for everyone, because the primary argument of the anti-gay marriage folks lately has been “oh but acknowledging that the law protects queers violates my religious conscience,” as if laws are a matter of personal morality open to the whims and interpretations of each individual.
Now a judge has slapped them down, telling them that laws come before faith. If you thought they were freaking out about Christianity under attack before, hoo boy, just wait’ll they hear about this.
