Monday, March 30, 2015

No Hoosier Hospitality for "Not Our Kind, Dear"

One of the excuses for the recently passed and signed Indiana RFRA is it's "just like" all the others, including the federal.

Aside from the "if everyone were leaping off the cliff, would you follow" idiocy of that justification, it isn't true.

"The Indiana RFRA departs from ... the federal RFRA—on which many other state laws are modeled. How? Indiana’s RFRA expressly provides that a person can assert a 'claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding'.”

You can read more here: "Indiana’s New Law Allows Discrimination. That Was the Point."

1 comment:

Paul K. Ogden said...

So what? As long as the law infringing on religious liberty is justified by a compelling interest the law stands. This is not unique language. Other states have it.

We have RFRAs or their judicial equivalent in 30 states and we have had a national RFRA for 22 years. We had the Sherbert compelling interest test, which the RFRA restored for 30 years. In those 52 years, point to one case where an RFRA law invalidated an anti-discrimination case. It hasn't happened because that's not what the RFRA does. The notion that it "licenses discrimination" was nothing more than a PR stunt.

No matter how many law professors come forward to explain Indiana's RFRA, how it works, why it's needed, some people simply aren't interested in the truth. They'd just rather pass along misinformation and engage in demagoguery.