Wednesday the Kansas State House approved a bill which would protect businesses and state and local government employees from lawsuits if they cited religious freedom as a reason to deny services to gay and lesbian citizens. Today the President of the Kansas State Senate said it wouldn’t make it through her part of the legislature without changes.
What Wagle said she wants to see emerging from the Senate is a measure that removes the language extending protections to individual state and local government employees, allowing them because of religious beliefs to refuse to provide services, such as fire and police protection, in certain circumstances to gays and lesbians.
“Public service needs to remain public service for the entire public,” she said.
Well, yeah. Fifty or sixty years of equal opportunity jurisprudence does indicate that if you try to do otherwise it’s likely to be ruled unconstitutional.
However, even removing the governments from the proposed law still gives businesses immunity from lawsuits if any of their employees decides he or she doesn’t feel like performing his or her job when the customer is anything but straight. One hopes the legislature figures out that that’s a discriminatory law as well.
Kansas has fallen into the hands of religious bigots and lunatics, and Governor Sam Brownback has become Nehemiah Scudder.
This is the perfect example of how some people are willing to gouge holes into their own face just to spite somebody, anybody.
Let’s put aside the nastiness, homophobia, religious beliefs, or whatever.
It’s like these people who have a problem gays fail to watch the movie to the end, with all their unintended consequences.
I’m envisioning a homophobic firefighters & police officers misinterpreting all sorts of things by these homophobic heterosexual people – who wind up being discriminated against based on being suspected of being homosexual.
Do they think they’re going to be obviously heterosexual? What do they think?
Will men have to make sure they’re never caught holding their daughter’s Hello Kitty back pack when their house is burning down just in case a homophobic firefighter shows up?
Will women have to make sure if they have short hair, they’re always wearing dresses, and never seen without make-up – just in case they need a homophobic paramedic to save their life?
These people who think it’s okay aren’t thinking things through for their own concerns, frankly.