Oxford Mayor Pat Patterson, center, listens on during a Board of Aldermen meeting in January.
Anna Brigance I The Daily Mississippian
A Mississippi Senate bill that has attracted national attention for its controversial language awaited a deadline vote yesterday by the House Judiciary B Committee.
Senate Bill 2681, also known as the Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed unanimously in the state Senate on Jan. 31 and was amended and passed by the House Judiciary B Committee yesterday.
Sen. Phillip A. Gandy, R-Waynesboro, authored the bill, and eight other senators cosponsored it.
Similar to religious freedom bills in 18 other states, the bill was originally intended to modify the great seal of Mississippi to include “In God We Trust,” but garnered attention for its controversial language concerning a clause about the exercise of religion.
According to the original text of the bill, the exercise of religion would have included, but not have been limited to, “the ability to act or the refusal to act in a manner that is substantially motivated by one’s sincerely held religious belief, whether or not the exercise is compulsory or central to a larger system of religious belief.”
Those opposing the bill believe that it will lead to discrimination against gay people and other minority groups, while those supporting the bill believe it will reinforce religious freedom, a concept promised in the U.S. Constitution.
The Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act gained more media attention when Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a similar bill after backlash from national GOP leadership, big business owners and supporters in her state last week.
Lance Bass, Mississippi native and former member of the band ‘N SYNC, spoke out against the bill in partnership with the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ civil rights organization.
“This bill doesn’t represent the Mississippi I knew growing up. It doesn’t represent the folks I went to church with every Sunday with my parents and my sister. And it certainly doesn’t reflect the Golden Rule I learned about sitting in those pews –— a simple moral code that says we should treat others the way we would want to be treated ourselves,” Bass said in an open letter to Human Rights Campaign members.
Mississippi and Arizona are not the only states to see controversy over such bills. Ohio, Indiana and Kansas have all introduced legislation that could aid discrimination against the LGBTQ community under the shroud of religious freedom.
“I hold onto a lot of stereotypes about the South, so I’m not really surprised that the original bill passed unanimously in the Senate,” senior political science major Kevin Murphy said.
John Lobur, associate classics professor, said such a bill would “definitely be a hateful step in the wrong direction,” if the measure is designed to legitimate businesses placing Jim Crow era-like signs in their windows.
He said that “one is tempted to see (the bill) as a political maneuver designed to strike at the so-called ‘gay agenda.’”
Last week on Feb. 26, the House Civil Subcommittee voted to remove all of the controversial language that would have sanctioned discrimination.
The current, revised version of the text has not been released to the public.
The University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation issued a statement on March 3, urging lawmakers to kill the bill, adding that if the bill is passed, Mississippi would be under a “shameful cloud of discrimination” that would hurt the state’s economy.
“Just as a restaurant shouldn’t be able to refuse a meal to customers because of their race, neither should a pharmacist be able to deny medicine to someone because he or she is gay,” the statement said.
The full House of Representatives will debate the bill in the coming days.
