Mississippi Is Close to Enacting America's Most Anti-LGBT Law
The Mississippi law, HB 1523, grants broad permission to discriminate against LGBT people, ostensibly to protect the ‘free exercise of religious beliefs.’
Samantha Allen
SAMANTHA ALLEN
06.26.17 1:00 AM ET
Mississippi’s HB 1523 has been called the “worst anti-LGBT law in America.” Now, after the 5th Circuit upheld the law last Thursday, it could finally go into effect.
Susan Sommer, director of constitutional litigation for the LGBT advocacy organization Lambda Legal, says it’s only a taste of challenges to come in a post-Obergefell country, and describes the law as a 'test balloon'.
HB 1523, signed by Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant in April of last year but prevented from going into effect by a June 2016 injunction in the case Baker v. Bryant, grants broad permission to discriminate against LGBT people, ostensibly to protect the “free exercise of religious beliefs.”
It does so by literally writing anti-LGBT “religious beliefs” and “moral convictions” into state law, namely the beliefs that “marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman” 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.”
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/mississippi-is-close-to-enacting-americas-most-anti-lgbt-law
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