On Monday, Georgia’s Republican governor Nathan Deal vetoed a “religious freedom” bill that would have conferred special protections to religious and other officials in the state should they choose to discriminate against LGBT citizens on religious grounds.

My Facebook and Twitter feeds were immediately flooded with people crowing about the discovery of “one decent Republican” in Georgia, but please, let me hasten to assure you all that the governor who some call “Shady” Deal is nothing of the sort.

Deal vetoed that bill yesterday because – as anyone who has followed his trouble with ethics watchdogs and Machiavellian maneuvering against any form of accountability knows – the only thing he loves more than Jesus and bullets is money. The ideological line between Deal and the frothing lawmakers in Georgia’s state legislature is razor thin, but Deal, at least, can do the math.

As CNN reported, Deal was under tremendous pressure from Atlanta-based mega-conglomerates like Coca-Cola and Home Depot to oppose the bill. Disney, Unilever and Salesforce all pledged to stop doing business with the state should the bill pass.

Really, though, it was probably when the NFL said that Atlanta would never have a Super Bowl if Georgia passed the bill that probably sealed the deal. Anyone who has lived in the south can tell you that if you want to kick Bubba where it hurts, you tell him you’re going to take away his football.



So, our governor did the smart thing and good for him. However, he’s still looking a little squishy on the issue of people packing guns on campuses and he’s not doing much to keep fundamentalist evangelicals in the state capitol from rolling back women’s rights to approximately the late Bronze Age.

Pity North Carolina’s Tea Party governor Pat McCrory didn’t have the same come-to-Jesus-and-pass-the-collection-plate moment before he signed that state’s bathroom bill into law last week. With the new law, North Carolina Republicans overturned all of the state’s protections for LGBT citizens and burned away a generation’s worth of hard-earned civil rights.

McCrory’s office was clearly unprepared for the swiftness and fury of the backlash that followed. The governor has issued a series of tone-deaf and verifiably false statements claiming to clarify what the bill does and does not do, but he and other state Republicans have been savaged by critics from around the world.

On Monday, a visibly sweaty McCrory gave a frazzled and defensive press conference in which he accused reliable rightwing bogeyman – the liberal media – of mounting a “calculated smear campaign” against him and his party. If you’re bored and got nothing better to do, take a minute to watch that press conference and hit “pause” every so often and see how many times you catch McCrory with his lips pulled back from his teeth in an open snarl.

“This political correctness has gone amok,” he whined in an interview with NBC News.

North Carolina is now facing multiple federal lawsuits about the statute, which the already cash-strapped state will have to spend millions of dollars defending in court. Way to clean up that wasteful government spending, conservatives. Bless your hearts.

It’s frankly a little amazing that men who are working so hard to strip other people of their rights can get this shrill and defensive when they’re called to task. Since the effort to legalize same-sex marriage got rolling in earnest, conservative state legislatures in Kansas, Indiana, Tennessee and across the country have been promoting and passing punitive, regressive anti-LGBT laws under the guise of protecting their first amendment right to freedom of religion.

Interestingly, Deal invoked the first amendment on Monday when he explained why he was vetoing the bill – which had its origins in last year’s legislative session, but was shot down before it could be passed.

“If indeed our religious liberty is conferred by God and not by man-made government, we should heed the ‘hands-off’ admonition of the first amendment to our constitution,” he said. “When legislative bodies attempt to do otherwise, the inclusions and omissions in their statutes can lead to discrimination, even though it may be unintentional. That is too great a risk to take.”

However, it remains to be seen what sort of epic tantrums the ideologues in the state government will pitch and what other forms of vicious legislation they will launch against the state’s LGBT citizens in the months ahead.

Those of us who live here have learned that every time you think the state’s Republicans can’t sink any lower, they open a trap door. So don’t be surprised if the far-right contingent in the state house and senate fires back with Georgia’s own version of North Carolina’s disastrous bill.

As we saw when they launched their doomed effort to drug test welfare recipients – in spite of the dramatic failure of a similar program in Florida which found that (surprise!) poor people mostly can’t afford to do drugs – they appear to be constitutionally incapable of learning from other states’ mistakes.

