Mississippi Legislature Passes ‘Religious Liberty’ Bill That Legalizes Discrimination Against Gay People

BY ZACK FORD/Think Progress

The Mississippi legislature has passed legislation that would allow people to use their religion to justify discrimination. It seemed last month that the “religious liberty” bill had sufficiently stalled after the House voted to send it a study committee instead of passing it, with many members noting how it could be used to promote discrimination. However, both the House and Senate have approved a conference report on the bill, advancing it to Gov. Phil Bryant (R) with problematic language.

“Religious liberty” bills like the one vetoed in Arizona differ from other states’ “Religious Freedom Restoration Acts” (RFRAs) because they extend religious protections to businesses.Mississippi’s bill has this same problem, because state law already defines a “person” to include “all public and private corporations.” Thus, if Bryant were to sign Mississippi’s bill into law, it would grant all businesses in the state a license to discriminate based on religious grounds.

Mississippi does not currently have any state or local nondiscrimination protections for the LGBT community, but a business could use this legislation to justify discrimination against anybody not protected by federal law. Public accommodations that are supposed to provide equal access to all citizens could attempt to refuse service to divorcees, people who’ve had children outside of wedlock, or anyone else who might give rise to a religious objection. And if any town or city in Mississippivoted to extend protections based on sexual orientation or gender identity, businesses could claim that those protections violate their religious beliefs and insist on discriminating against LGBT people.

Though proponents of such “religious liberty” bills claim that they do not promote discrimination, the examples they cite to explain why such legislation is necessary entailphotographers and bakers refusing service to same-sex couples. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins praised Mississippi for advancing this bill, specifically highlighting how it would protect “a wedding vendor, whose orthodox Christian faith will not allow her to affirm same-sex ‘marriage.’”

Bryant has not yet indicated whether he intends to sign the bill.

This Bizarre Racial Profiling Lawsuit Will Do Nothing To Restore Your Faith In Mississippi

BY IAN MILLHISER/Think Progress

Cathryn Stout is a doctoral student at Saint Louis University researching a paper on how residents of Mississippi are working to combat negative stereotypes about their state. She may want to reconsider that paper topic, however, after her alleged encounter with three Mississippi police officers.

According to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on Friday, Stout was traveling through Mississippi with a man named Raymond Montgomery to conduct interviews for her academic research when they were stopped by a highway patrol officer. Both Stout and Montgomery are African American.

The trooper allegedly told them they were stopped because Stout’s license plate was framed by an Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority tag holder that obscured part of her plate. He issued no ticket for this supposed violation, however, and her attorney claims that her tag holder broke no Mississippi law. Alpha Kappa Alpha is an historically black sorority.

After Montgomery denied a request by the trooper to search the vehicle, the lawsuit alleges that things escalated very quickly. Over the course of the next hour, two more police officers arrived on the scene, including a police staff sergeant and an officer with a police dog. The officers interrogated Stout about the purpose of her trip to Mississippi. They asked if anyone had asked them to “transport anything” or if they were carrying weapons. When Stout began to video record the encounter with her cell phone, one of the officers allegedly ordered her to put her phone away. By the time the police finally let Stout and Montgomery go, the lawsuit alleges, the officers had rummaged through their luggage and Stout’s purse. They’d searched every compartment of the vehicle, and they’d used a wrench and a crowbar to remove the panels on the sides of Stout’s car.

They found nothing incriminating.

The Supreme Court has made these kinds of lawsuits very difficult to win. Among other things, the Court held in Whren v. United States that police who witness a driver committing a minor traffic offense can use that offense as a pretext to stop the vehicle and potentially escalate the stop into a search for evidence of a much more serious crime. Nevertheless, there are factors in Stout and Montgomery’s case — the possibility of racial profiling, the fact that police may has escalated the search without any valid justification for doing so, the fact that Stout’s license plate holder may not have violated any actual laws — that could enable them to prevail.

In the meantime, however, both Stout and Montgomery sought counseling to deal with the emotional toll exacted by this alleged incident. Stout also has not returned to central Mississippi, despite the fact that these trips are a useful component of her academic research, “due to emotional wounds and fear of a similar incident.”

Maddow rips Mississippi Republicans over abortion crack down

By Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story

On her show Thursday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow explained how Mississippi Republicans have nearly forced the only abortion clinic in the state to shut down.

Lawmakers in the state forced the abortion clinic to comply with regulations that were “impossible to comply with,” according to Maddow. The abortion clinic will be forced to shut down in January unless a judge blocks the law from taking effect.

“So this thing designed by Mississippi Republicans to be impossible turned out to be impossible,” she said. “They wanted to create a new regulation that the state’s one last abortion clinic could not follow, because they wanted to shut it down.”

The liberal MSNBC host noted that Republicans had publicly admitted the law was intended to make Mississippi an abortion-free state.

“January 11th is when American women in one American state will lose access to what is supposedly their constitutionally protected right, because Republicans in that state decided that for them,” Maddow concluded.

Watch video, courtesy of MSNBC, below:

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Judge continues to block Mississippi anti-abortion law

By Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi on Wednesday continued to block a law that would shutter the state’s only abortion clinic.

“Today’s decision means a woman in Mississippi will continue to be able to make her own personal health care decisions in consultation with her family, her faith and her physician – at least for the time being,” Kay Scott, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast, said. “Women’s health is of paramount importance to Planned Parenthood. While this case continues, there are health care challenges in Mississippi that Planned Parenthood is working to address every day. Mississippi has some of the worst health outcomes for women, including some of the highest rates of unintended pregnancies, maternal and infant mortality, and sexually transmitted infections including HIV.”

District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III issued a restraining order shortly after the law went into effect on July 1, effectively saving the Jackson Women’s Health Organization from being shut down. After a hearing on Wednesday, Jordan continued to block the law from being implemented.

The new law, passed by the state’s Republicans with the support of Gov. Phil Bryant (R), requires doctors who perform abortions to become registered in obstetrics and gynecology and secure permission to admit patients to a local hospital.

However, it is extremely rare for women to experience severe medical complications during abortions. In addition, not a single one of the physicians at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization have been granted permission to hospitalize patients.

Republicans have boasted that the law would eliminate legal abortion in the state — a boast that has come back to bite them.

Despite pleas from state attorneys to ignore public officials’ statements, Jordan said there was evidence the law was intended to eliminate access to abortion, which is a constitutional right according to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“In this case, Plaintiffs have offered evidence — including quotes from significant legislative and executive officers — that the Act’s purpose is to eliminate abortions in Mississippi,” Jordan wrote in his restraining order. “They likewise submitted evidence that no safety or health concerns motivated its passage. This evidence has not yet been rebutted.”

MISSISSIPPI GOVERNOR-ELECT: PERSONHOOD AMENDMENT COULD RESURFACE IN 2012

By Tanya Somanader/Think Progress

Women’s rights activists took heart after Mississippi voters resoundingly rejected the state’s personhood amendment that would effectively ban all abortions, certain forms of birth control, and even in vitro fertilization for couples struggling to have a child. However, Mississippi’s Governor-Elect Phil Bryant (R) is now saying that the personhood proposal or something similar may “resurface in the 2012 legislature.” Bryant — who told a rape victim that “satan wins” if the personhood amendment fails — said the loss illustrates that “a better effort could have been shown to present information on the Constitutional Amendment.”

Despite the amendment’s defeat in a staunchly pro-life state, several other states are jumping on the personhood bandwagon including Arkansas, Ohio, Montana, Florida, Nevada, California, and Alabama.

Fifty-five years after Brown v. Board, Mississippi county schools ordered to stop school segregation.

By Amanda Terkel Today, a federal court ordered a county in Walthall County in Mississippi to “stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county’s only majority-white school.” From the Justice Department’s press release:

“More than 55 years after Brown v. Board of Education, it is unacceptable for school districts to act in a way that encourages or tolerates the resegregation of public schools,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “We will take action so that school districts subject to federal desegregation orders comply with their obligation to eliminate vestiges of separate black and white schools.”

According to the motion, the district’s practice of permitting hundreds of students — the vast majority whom are white — to attend schools outside their assigned residential attendance zone without restriction prompted a disproportionate number of white students to attend a single school in the district, leaving a number of other schools disproportionately black.

Indeed, evidence in the case suggested that the community regarded certain schools in the district as “white schools” or “black schools.” The United States also asserted that officials in certain district schools grouped, or “clustered,” white students together in particular classrooms, resulting in large numbers of all-black classes at every grade level in those schools.

After being confirmed as attorney general, Eric Holder said that he would make sure the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division return to its traditional role of pushing “high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies, in areas ranging from housing to hiring, where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly.” During the Bush administration, officials — who were hired for their “strong conservative credentials” rather than their civil rights experience — “discouraged such tactics.”