Freedom for Me but not for Thee

Two state-level anti-LGBT bills, recently passed in Mississippi and North Carolina, have renewed the ongoing debate over “religious liberty” in post-Obergefell America. The details of each are worth considering, but taken together the laws—and their fallout—make this much clear: conservatives still don’t have a coherent approach to what religious liberty should mean in a secular, pluralistic society like our own.

The Mississippi law, HB1523, signed by Gov. Phil Bryant yesterday, forthrightly asserts that it is about “protecting” religious believers from LGBT people, along with anyone who is divorced, anyone who has had sex outside of marriage, and even single mothers. Note the language it uses:

The sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that:

(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;

(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and

(c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.

The bill goes on to specify in some detail what those protections entail in practice, which includes everything from giving religious believers the right to not participate in certain marriage ceremonies to allowing for “sex-specific standards or policies concerning employee or student dress or grooming.” (For more, see Zack Ford’s comprehensive account of what the bill means here.)

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