Indiana legislature, Gov. Pence awaken a fierce, powerful, anti-discrimination giant

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03/27/2015

by Jeremy Hooper

I started beating the drum about "religious freedom" laws relatively early. I've mentioned on here before how, in or around the summer of 2012, I got hold of an intercepted document in which a collection of anti-LGBT groups were "explaining" why their movement needed to take on this push as a sort of Phase Two of their marriage fight. It was only a few months later that I saw them beating the drum in state after state, reconfirming just how concerted, on-message, and vicious the other side can be when they want to pass something nasty and hide it as a social "good."

Fortunately, I think Indiana's passage of a particularly strident license-to-discriminate law might have been a bridge too far. Some are calling it a new "Prop 8 moment," referring to how the ugliness of the soul-crushing loss actually helped us in the long run since it sparked some an undeniable fire under folks who were far too complacent prior to the California ban's ignoble passage. Whether the Prop 8 comparison is an overstatement or not remains to be seen. I do know that I am seeing strong backlash like I haven't seen in a very long time. A taste:

Some are criticizing folks for speaking out now rather than earlier, when there was a chance to defeat it in Indiana. But I really can't. We can't fool ourselves into thinking that everyone spends as much time thinking about this stuff as we do. The less engaged citizen might hear something about this kind of bill in the news, but it doesn't tend to sound as nasty when you hear about it in passing. Sadly, it sometimes takes doing something wrongheaded for folks to realize just how wrongheaded it is. It takes a lot of people to start talking before light bulbs start to pop up in a way that lights a path forward.

For this, a conversation that was always wonkier and more difficult to have than the one involving marriage, this might just be the game changer that we needed.

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