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Gay is the New Black
Author: BobR    Date: 02/26/2014 12:39:52

The history of humanity is certainly a mixed bag. For every hero of human rights, there is a villain. Every time there is a significant advancement in law securing those rights, there is a lawmaker looking for and exploiting loopholes. Slavery required the 15th Amendment. Jim Crow laws required the 24th - and then the Civil Rights Act. Even those have been circumvented via voter ID laws and limiting the number of voting machines in minority districts.

The latest battlefield in the fight for equality is in the LBGT arena. The overturn of DOMA and Don't Ask / Don't Tell, and the victories in the courts against state-instituted measures have turned the haters into creators of anti-LGBT legislation and other initiatives. It's the final frontier in hate.

The most well-known among these is the legalized discrimination bill in Arizona which Gov. Brewer is still mulling over. That she didn't veto it right away tells you all you need to know about her. One of the authors of the bill stated that "the legislation was not anti-gay if it could also be use to turn away straight people who support same-sex marriage". No, of course it isn't.

Georgia - no stranger to denying rights to certain groups of humans - is jumping on the bandwagon with its own legalized discrimination bill:
According to Mother Jones, hotels and restaurants could refuse to serve LGBT people, potentially returning Georgia to its segregated, Jim Crow roots.

Legislators introduced the “Preservation of Religious Freedom Act” last week, and moved it to committee discussion on Monday. If enacted, the law would allow business owners in the state to deny services to LGBT people with impunity if the businesses allege that they are doing so on the basis of a “sincerely held religious belief.”

The linked Mother Jones article states:
Unlike similar bills introduced in Kansas, Tennessee, and South Dakota, the Georgia and Arizona bills do not explicitly target same-sex couples. But that difference could make the impact of the Georgia and Arizona bills even broader. Legal experts, including Eunice Rho, advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU, warn that Georgia and Arizona's religious-freedom bills are so sweeping that they open the door for discrimination against not only gay people, but other groups as well.

It's even spilling over into private enterprise. A Republican lobbyist is requesting legislation banning gay players in the NFL. as if that's any business of Congress. What's scary is that he said:
...he had five members in the House and one senator who would put their weight behind the bill. He predicted up to 36 House members and up to five senators would join the effort in the next three weeks.

Besides being abhorrent to us as human beings, all of this hate is unhealthy. A study has concluded that LGBT people who live in communities where they are hated have a shorter life expectancy due to stress. That makes sense - stress of any type can be a killer. But stress induced by legislative fiat against those who were born the way they were born seems particularly offensive, especially considering the consequences.

At least they aren't being lynched... officially.
 

37 comments (Latest Comment: 02/27/2014 01:35:08 by clintster)
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