"Excruciatingly Different" Mississippi Religious Lib Law Specifies Beliefs
BY STEPHANIE RUSSELL-KRAFT
MAY 16, 2016
The Mississippi “religious liberty” law that will soon allow public officials to refuse service to same-sex couples and transgender individuals was hit with two legal challenges last week, one by the ACLU and the other by the Campaign for Southern Equality. Both suits argue the law, HB 1523, violates the constitutional protections laid down by the Supreme Court in last year’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which it clearly does. But it also brazenly violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from unduly favoring one religion over another.
Mississippi’s law, which protects only three specific religiously-based beliefs (that marriage should be between men and women only, that sex outside of marriage is immoral, and that gender and sex are only determined by anatomy at birth), is “excruciatingly different” from most generic state religious freedom laws, according to Andrew Seidel, constitutional attorney at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc.
“They’ve actually chosen which religious beliefs they’re going to exempt, and that’s a big problem under the Establishment Clause,” Seidel said. Most of the religious freedom laws privilege religion over non-religion, but the Mississippi law also privileges religion over religion, he explained. He called that additional step a “deadly mixture of ignorance and hubris.”
Though it didn’t raise an Establishment Clause argument, the ACLU hinted at this problem in its complaint: “Many individuals and organizations have strong religious and moral objections to interfaith marriages … to recognizing a second marriage following a civil divorce … to marriages between people of different races.” HB 1523 doesn’t give any of those individuals the right to act on those religious or moral beliefs.
Mississippi legislators basically got so specific with their religious freedom language that they tipped their hand entirely. Not only do specific religious views get preferential treatment, but there is no balancing protection for any other interests involved.
http://religiondispatches.org/excruciatingly-different-mississippi-religious-lib-law-specifies-beliefs/
https://www.aclu-ms.org/files/8514/6281/6855/HB_Complaint_as_filed.pdf
http://www.southernequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Motion-to-reopen-Campaign-for-Southern-Equality-v-Bryant.pdf
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