Don’t Let Mississippi Establish Anti-Gay Religion
The federal law and its many state imitators apply equally to all sincere religious believers and their beliefs. The Mississippi statute doesn’t.
It begins by singling out three religious beliefs or moral convictions for protection. They are 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.”
The law then goes on to insulate believers in those principles from a whole range of anti-discrimination actions by the state. These include housing discrimination, employment discrimination and refusal to offer commercial services like photography and flowers to gay couples who are getting married. It allows any entity to refuse to participate in sex-reassignment therapy or treatment. It also protects entities from having to allow transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex to which they have transitioned.The law also says that anyone authorized to perform marriages in Mississippi can choose not to perform gay marriages.
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