Well, so what about GenCon and its threat to moving to somewhere else? :confused: And what about all these claims about this law opening the door to horrendous anti-gay discrimination? :confused:
There
are a few places in the state that have public accommodation laws that this law could theoretically allow people to discriminate, and it's possible that it'll have an impact on employment law for highly religiously motivated organizations. It's not likely, but it could happen. It's just not happened in any other areas where very similar laws have occurred, and would be very costly and difficult to do even if someone's dumb enough to try, and it's far from the only or even most common impact of this sort of law.
I'm not sure whether the reporting reflects people unaware of the current state of the law, how many are speaking from a normative rather than descriptive focus, and who's intentionally overstating the impact.
There is federal law on this - specifically the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits discrimination on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin". So a business that is considered a "public accommodation" such as a restaurant or bakery cannot refuse service on the basis of someone's race, for example.
I've said this
before in this thread, but for the purposes of the CRA-1964, "public accommodation" only includes a fairly small number of services. Restaurants are covered, bakeries are not.
Underneath
that, the federal CRA can not be altered nor have its interpretation altered by state law -- Supremacy Clause! -- so it can only be affected by the federal RFRA, not any state RFRA.
This federal law does not include sexual orientation, so unless there is a state law (like there is in Colorado), the shop owner can refuse service on the basis of being gay.
Uh... historically, true, but the EEOC has been working to expand the federal law's definition of "discrimination on the basis of sex" to
include orientation and gender presentation. They're more on the employment side and are still working to persuade the courts, but they're taken pretty seriously and part of why this sorta thing is happening today.
After the success of the Hobby Lobby ruling for the power of the RFRA, a state RFRA can be seen as a pre-emptive effort to ensure that religiously-motivated behavior is allowed despite other laws to the contrary.
Well, yes.
Does anyone more experienced in legalese want to unpack that one for me? Because it sounds really bad from a layman's perspective.
It
looks like an attempt to prevent local jurisdictions from pulling or refusing to issue certs to anti-gay folk, but it's written pretty incoherently and I'm not sure exactly how it would be interpreted.
It's also been tabled since January, so it's not getting anywhere.