Read the Mississippi Memorandum here:

http://bit.ly/1SNYHiz



Read the Georgia Memorandum here:

http://bit.ly/1pGlmmO

Media Contact:

Elizabeth Reiner Platt

Associate Director, Public Rights/Private Conscience Project

ep2801@columbia.edu

April 5, 2016—More than a dozen law professors with expertise in constitutional and civil rights law have signed memoranda published by the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project at Columbia Law School that analyze two so-called “religious liberty” bills recently passed in Mississippi and Georgia.

Mississippi’s bill, HB 1523, was signed into law today by Governor Phil Bryant. The Project’s analysis concludes that HB 1523 is among the broadest religious accommodation bills to be passed by any state legislature. It builds into state law unconstitutional exemptions for particular religious views on marriage, sexual relations, workplace sex equality, and gender identity. Under HB 1523, religious organizations, individuals, for-profit entities, and even government workers are granted the right to discriminate against a broad range of Mississippians in a variety of contexts including housing, employment, public services, education, and adoption.

Even worse, it prohibits the government from withdrawing grants or contracts from organizations that discriminate, and could therefore lead to the use of taxpayer funds to sponsor religiously-motivated discrimination.

The memoranda, which outline both bills’ constitutional and policy flaws, were signed by a total of 19 law professors from schools including the University of Mississippi School of Law, Mississippi College of Law, Emory University, Atlanta’s John Marshall School of Law, Mercer University School of Law.

“HB 1523 is a solution in search of a problem, as religious belief and practice already receive strong protection under state and federal law,” said Columbia Law School Professor Katherine Franke, director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. “Rather than strengthening religious liberty protections, the bill radically overreaches by favoring religious believers at the expense of other private citizens. This amounts to a violation on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.”

Elizabeth Reiner Platt, associate director at the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project, said that the bills “are representative of wave of legislation that has cloaked resistance to LGBT rights, and especially the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision, as a movement for religious freedom.”

Like HB 1523, Georgia’s HB 757 would have condoned and encouraged both public and private discrimination. Governor Nathan Deal has promised to veto the bill.

While the memos’ signatories have a range of views on the appropriate balance between religious and secular rights, in the words of Governor Deal they “do not think we have to discriminate against anyone to protect the faith-based community.”