LGBT News Indiana RFRA: Much ado about nothing???

Here is an opinion from distinguished legal scholars on why this law unduly favours religious exemptions from the burden of state sanctions.

http://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/d...ity/law_professors_letter_on_indiana_rfra.pdf

I found this paragraph most interesting:

Clearly, Indiana's unamended RFRA would shift the burden of religious accommodation to a third party, i.e. LGBT folk.

 

Again, these laws can be just fine when lgbt people are protected, as in other states.

And sure, the courts may have found that the differences between this law and other laws to be moot and rülė that the changes are not operable. However, that doesn't change the facts that this law was written differently and Pence and the legislators who pushed this through did it for bigoted reasons.

this guy is correct that RFRA laws haven't been used this way before but waving away the differences and claiming that this is the same is ridiculous. If they'd passed the same laws that other states have there wouldn't be this controversy, but they didn't, so there is.

 

Well, the reason why the Indiana law is a problem is because they don't have any law preventing anti-LGBT discrimination. So this law is probably not the main issue, but it could create other issues without any law against discrimination of LGBT people.

 

The law might not effect the LGBTQ community immediately, but since it has the capability to effect them, that's why many people were outraged. Not to mention this law would also make it possible to discriminate against divorced people, unwed teenage mothers, religious minorities, and so on.

 

Whether it was used in the past to discriminate is not really the point. With at least three prominent homophobes standing behind Gov. Pence when he signed the law, it was clearly their intent that it would be used to give cover to those who would refuse services to LGBT and other minorities on the basis of religion.

They promoted this law in anticipation of what everyone expects: a supreme court ruling that demolishes all same-sex marriage bans in all 50 states.

Interesting turn of events today though...although there is no state civil rights legislation that recognizes LGBT as a protected class, this RFRA, if today's proposed amendment passes and is signed by Go. Pence would actually clearly spell out protections for LGBT and other minorities.

That's what I call getting your own hands burned by the same hot coals you were trying to throw at us.