(London Guardian) -- The pathetic thing about Indiana Governor Mike Pence and his water carriers at the Weekly Standard and historically pro-segregationist rag National Review is that none of them will ever have the stones of someone like George Wallace and stand for the modern segregation of LGBT people and pledge never to get out-queered again. The optics are too bad and too unambiguous for their political ambitions to survive.
But you only sign a law like Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act – which radically expands private businesses’ ability to discriminate against against LGBT citizens by preserving bigoted business ownersfrom private litigation – to preemptively pardon people who want to the ability to circumscribe or reject the civil rights of their fellow citizens. That’s it.
The real political mistake was the strength of the RFRA in the first place: rather than a mealy-mouthed statutory reminder of the constitutional right to religion without government interference to placate a loud minority, it boldly delineates the mechanisms of unaccountable discrimination on a citizen-by-citizen basis and dangerously reminds the rest of us of the control that Christian bigots have had over American society from day one until the present.
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