Mississippi's HB 1523

This morning, the state of Mississippi followed in the terrifying footsteps of North Carolina in taking steps backward for the LGBTQ community.  Governor Phil Bryant of Mississippi signed HB1523 into law, which allows businesses to deny services to individuals in the LGBTQ community based on religious beliefs, claiming to protect businesses “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions.”  Similar to North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” Mississippi’s “religious freedom” bill will bring immense detriment to business, but the governing bodies of the state seem to feel so strongly about rejecting the rights of LGBTQ individuals that they are willing to sacrifice a stable economy from the business they will lose.

This new “religious freedom” law strips a major percentage of individuals in Mississippi from their rights of equality and consequently makes thousands of residents feel uncomfortable and unsafe in their own skin, as their state clearly feels uncomfortable with their very being.  As this is a politically oriented discussion, it only fair to reference the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, an amendment that Governor Bryant seemed to have forgotten to reference when signing this bill into law this morning.  As it states: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  Clearly, stripping the entire LGBTQ community in Mississippi from sharing the right to be served by the businesses that serve their heterosexual peers does “abridge” their rights, deprive a “person of life, liberty, or property” and of course, deny countless people of their “equal protection of the laws.”  

Of course, in my personal opinion, I think this new “bathroom law” is drastically offensive, discriminatory, homophobic, among several other adjectives.  However, it is also just blatantly undemocratic.  One would assume that a strong Republican governor such as Bryant would be more concerned with strictly following the constitution, but Governor Bryant seemed to put his strict constitutionalism aside in order to emphasize his strong discrimination towards the LGBTQ community, clearly disregarding the importance and legitimacy of the rights to one's own sexual identity.  This ostracization and blatant homophobia should be considered a hate crime, but rather, the American legal system allows such acts to occur.  We can only hope that such a law raises immense discourse about the drastic negative implications of homophobia in our hopefully one day democratic society.