Mississippi Governor is Still Fighting to Pass Religious Exemption Law

The governor of Mississippi is still fighting to pass a discriminatory law that would permit business and government employees to deny services to same-sex couples if they say it’s against their religion.

It’s basically the same bill that vice president hopeful Mike Pence passed in Indiana a few short years ago. An act that Visit Indy — Indianapolis’s convention and tourism organization — found that Indiana lost at least $60 million in revenue after lawmakers there passed the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which gave businesses the greenlight to discriminate against LGBT people on religious grounds.

Mississippi’s Gov. Phil Bryant signed the law that is designed to protect the religious beliefs that marriage is only between a man and a woman, that sex should only happen within a marriage and that a person’s gender can’t be altered once it is determined at birth.

But U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves blocked the “religious freedom” law in July right before it was supposed to go into effect because he said it was unconstitutional and created unequal treatment for LGBT people.

But, it seems his bigotry runs deep as he continues to fight for the bill. Bryant is asking a federal appeals court to uphold the law through private attorneys, as the state’s Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood declined to appeal the judge’s ruling.

Supporters say the law will protect people’s religious belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. Opponents say it violates the equal-protection guarantee of the Constitution.

“This bill merely reinforces the rights which currently exist to the exercise of religious freedom as stated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Bryant said in a statement defending the bill.

Judge Reeves wrote that everything about the bill indicates that it “was the state’s attempt to put LGBT citizens back in their place” after the Supreme Court ruled on the side of marriage equality last year.