In response to two native Americans who were fired when they told their co-workers about smoking peyote as part of a native American religious ceremony, President Bill Clinton persuaded Congress in 1993 to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts.
This law was intended to protect members of religious minorities.
In an ironic twist, the law is now being used by Republican state legislatures to justify passing what are called First Amendment Defense Acts that claim citizens deserve the freedom to cite their religious beliefs as a basis for denying service to people whose lifestyle they find morally objectionable.
In other words, these laws are intended to protect the right of Christian business owners to use their love of Jesus to discriminate against gays and lesbians and transgender individuals.
We’ve been here before, and the picture is as ugly now as it has always been.
In 1964 Lloyd Maurice Bessinger, Sr., a South Carolina businessman who owned four barbecue restaurants, refused service to Mrs. Anne Newman, the wife of a local African American minister, who entered one of his restaurants to have lunch.
She sued on the basis of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and won.
In his own defense Bessinger said: “It is really a constitutional right whether a man has the right to run his business without governmental interference.” His attorney went further and argued that the 1964 Civil Rights Act “was invalid because it `contravenes the will of God’ and constitutes an interference with the `free exercise of the Defendant’s religion.'”
In Bessinger’s mind he was justified in his actions. “I’m just a fair man,” he said. “I want to be known as a hard-working, Christian man that loves God and wants to further (God’s) work throughout the world as I have been doing throughout the last 25 years.”
The evangelical push to persuade Donald Trump to put his support behind Republican state legislatures passing laws that provide a legal basis for businesses to discriminate against GLBT Americans needs to be seen from this historical context.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a critical step in our nation’s efforts to end racial discrimination. Without it Mrs. Newman would not have won her case. States are now passing laws intended to turn back the clock, this time aimed at undermining civil rights on the basis of sexual orientation and gender.
That religious freedom is being used to justify these efforts the same way it was used to justify racial discrimination means that once again evangelicals are making Christianity itself complicit in evil.
The Civil Rights Act was the nation’s way of stating a truth all decent people should affirm, that all discrimination regardless of its particular expression is both illegal and morally wrong.
So the only difference between Lloyd Maurice Bessinger’s defense of his right as a Christian to engage in racial discrimination and business owners today who say their religious freedom is being violated if they have to serve GLBT individuals is 53 years.
Nothing else.
If a rose by any other name is still a rose, discrimination by any other name is still discrimination.
That there are Christians who do not believe this is true proves that there are instances when some religion can be worse than none at all.
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