A bill that would allow businesses and public employees in Mississippi to deny service to same-sex couples because of their religious beliefs passed the state senate on Wednesday night. Senators voted 31-17 in favor of the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act.

Similar bills have been introduced in North Carolina and Georgia. Since signing the the bill into a law, North Carolina’s governor Pat McCrory has come under fire from LGBT activists and large US companies such as Apple, Google and Bank of America. Georgia governor Nathan Deal said he would veto his state’s law.

LGBT activists say the Mississippi bill is the most discriminatory yet. It seeks to protect beliefs that marriage is a union between a man and a woman; that “sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage”; and that sex is determined by anatomy and genetics at birth.

The bill, HB1523, will now go back to the Mississippi house, which is expected to vote in its favor a second time, having passed it in February by an 80-39 vote. The bill will then head to the desk of Mississippi governor, Phil Bryant, who is expected to sign it into law.

“I don’t think it’s discriminatory,” the governor told WLOX TV earlier this week. “I think it gives some people, as I appreciate it, the right to be able to say: ‘That’s against my religious beliefs and I don’t need to carry out that particular task.’”

Opponents of the bill say it will allow open discrimination against LGBT people. For example, under the law a florist or caterer could decline to work on a same-sex marriage or a doctor could refuse to provide counseling, sex-reassignment surgery or fertility treatment. Schools and companies would be able to set, in the words of the bill, “sex-specific standards or policies concerning employee or student dress or grooming”.

Clerks could also decline to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, skirting federal law.

“I think it sets a state’s ability to decide who they want to serve, who they want to discriminate against,” Charlie Osborne, a protester against the bill, told WLOX after joining others at the state capitol in Jackson on Tuesday. “It’s a slippery slope.”



Nykolas Alford, another protester, said: “This [bill] is like Jim Crow for the gays.”

Justin Nelson, president and co-founder of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, said: “Religion is being used for the most immoral purpose possible: the denigration of entire populations to second-class citizens based entirely on fear and propaganda.



“This is the most broadly discriminatory bill we’ve seen introduced, and should serve as a shocking reminder to anyone not yet convinced that the fight for equality in America continues long after marriage rights have been granted by the United States supreme court.”

Mississippi state senator Jennifer Branning, who introduced the bill, said it was written as a response to the supreme court case that legalized same-sex marriage last summer.

“This is presenting a solution to the crossroads we find ourselves in today as a result of Obergefell v Hodges,” she said. “Ministers, florists, photographers, people along those lines – this bill would allow them to refuse to provide marriage-related business services without fear of government discrimination.”



Branning also insisted that the bill “takes no rights away from anyone” and is “not a bill to allow any type of discrimination at all”.