Arkansas is out to prove that Virginia and Alabama are not the only states controlled by GOP legislatures that ignore the fact that federal law - and U.S. Supreme Court rulings - ALWAYS trump state law. How else to explain Arkansas' passage of a bill that bars localities from enacting anti-discrimination laws that protect gays from being fired or refused accommodations simply because they are gay? The law is much like the one passed in Colorado in 1992 which led to the ruling in Romer v. Evans which struck down the animus motivated Colorado measure. Frankly, it is all part and parcel with the Christofascists' increasing belief that they are above the laws that govern the rest of us and/or that they are entitled to special rights. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the work of the Arkansas Christofascists and their political whores in the Arkansas GOP. Here are excerpts:
Social conservatives are losing the moral battle on LGBT equality—but they’re not giving up without a fight.
More specifically, they’re starting to look like cornered animals, lashing out with everything they’ve got. We’ve already seen Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore pull a Governor Wallace and order probate judges to disobey a federal court order. And this week, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback abruptly stripped LGBT state employees of nondiscrimination protection.
The latest entry in conservative anti-gay desperation? Arkansas, which just banned any city in the Natural State from protecting its LGBT residents from discrimination. (The legislature passed the bill Friday, and Gov. Asa Hutchinson has announced that he will neither veto nor sign the bill, but allow it to become law without his signature.)
Not only can you now be fired from your job for being gay, turned away from a hotel because you’re gay, and barred from visiting your sick spouse in the hospital because you’re gay—now, even if the enlightened city of Fayetteville (whose nondiscrimination ordinance sparked the effort) wanted to help you, they can’t.
If Arkansas’ new bill sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Back in 1992, Colorado did something very similar. Outraged that liberal enclaves Aspen and Boulder had passed measures protecting gays from discrimination, the state’s citizens passed Amendment 2, prohibiting any state or municipal agency from protecting gays from discrimination.
You may also remember that this is unconstitutional. In the 1996 case of Romer v. Evans, the Supreme Court held that Amendment 2 was unconstitutional, since there was no basis for it other than animus against gay people.
Well aware that Amendment-2-style actions are unconstitutional, the Arkansas bill cleverly bans local governments from extending civil rights protection to “any class not covered in state law.” Paraphrasing Mayor Quimby here, “that could be any protected class that we don’t like.” Not just homosexuals.
The trouble for Arkansas is that there’s now a huge legislative record that shows that, drafting notwithstanding, this bill is about LGBT people. All the statements, pro and con, show that.
Even in Romer itself, the Court noted various anti-gay statements on the part of Amendment 2’s backers, which comprised some of the evidence that Amendment 2 was motivated by anti-gay animus.
Nor would the case for “uniformity” really fly either. Arkansas, like all states, has all kinds of laws that vary from place to place.
Like the Brownback Rollback [in Kansas], Arkansas’s “Don’t Save Gays” law is an act of desperation. It plays to the hard right base, and if it’s ultimately a losing battle, that resonates with conservative evangelicals’ martyr complex, and their widely-held apocalyptic belief that America is going to hell in a big gay handbasket.
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