Growing up with a history of racism around them, Derrick and Errick Simmons are fighting a religious freedom bill that would allow LGBT discrimination

Mississippi senator Derrick Simmons sat in his law firm opposite his partner and identical twin, Errick Simmons. Errick – the mayor of Greenville, where they grew up – said Mississippi’s new anti-LGBT religious freedom law was worse than Jim Crow-era discrimination.

“If we begin to sit down and sit still, we will return back to those 50s and 60s days where people will be hanging from a tree because of LGBT status,” he said.

House Bill 1523 gives legal protections to government employees, doctors and other Mississippians who refuse service to same-sex couples or transgender people based on “sincerely held religious beliefs”. Advocates have called it among the most extreme anti-LGBT state laws in the country.

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The twin politicians are organizing their community, and particularly African Americans, to get Governor Phil Bryant to halt the law before it goes into effect in less than two weeks – unless the court stops it before then.

The deep south has historically been hostile to gay people, and last year Mississippi was ranked dead last in support of LGBT nondiscrimination laws in a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.

But among Mississippians, black Americans are the least supportive of same-sex marriage and nondiscrimination laws of any demographic, the survey showed. In 2015, only a quarter of all Mississippians supported same-sex marriage.

The brothers, both Democrats, are taking on what they view as a form of hypocrisy within their own community.

“You have one part of the black conservative southern community who say marriage is not between Adam and Steve, it’s between Adam and Eve,” Errick said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Errick Simmons: ‘If we begin to sit down and sit still, we will return back to those 50s and 60s days where people will be hanging from a tree because of LGBT status.’ Photograph: Emrys Eller/The Guardian

But the brothers said growing up with a history of racism all around them – Mississippi is the only remaining state in the union whose flag is derivative of the confederate south’s – inspired their activism.

Errick said there are many in the southern black community who live with the memory of Jim Crow and support LGBT rights as a consequence.

HB 1523 is one of at least 17 state religious freedom bills proposed since the supreme court’s ruling that legalized same-sex marriage last June. Three bills became law, but Mississippi’s is unique in the expansive scope of its provisions and how blatantly the bill singles out LGBT people, said Laura Durso, a senior director at the Center for American Progress.

While other laws have been vague in their protection of a range of religious beliefs, Mississippi’s Protecting Freedom of Conscience From Government Discrimination Act specifically states that marriage is between “one man and one woman” and that “male” or “female” refer to an individual’s “immutable biological sex”. It also condemns sexual relations outside marriage.

The law protects doctors who refuse fertility treatment or gender reassignment surgery and employers who make sex-specific grooming rules or “access to restrooms, spas, baths, showers, dressing rooms [or] locker rooms”.



The bill also protects foster and adoptive parents who raise or guide children “with sincerely held religious beliefs”, a notion that Durso said was never under threat. “We actually all believe in religious freedom, but what we’re asking for is that you cannot use that belief as a sword to discriminate,” she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Derrick Simmons said if HB 1523 becomes law he will draft a repeal in the next legislative session. Photograph: Emrys Eller/The Guardian

On 21 June a federal judge denied an injunction to block HB 1523 before it goes into effect on 1 July. US district judge Carlton Reeves refused the injunction in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Mississippi on behalf of same-sex couples engaged to be married sometime in the next three years. Reeves ruled the suit failed to prove an “imminent threat”.

On Thursday, Reeves, who overturned Mississippi’s ban on same-sex marriage in July, will hear arguments in another case that seeks to block HB 1523. This lawsuit filed by religious leaders against the governor and Mississippi, claiming the bill violates the separation of church and state.



Derrick said if HB 1523 becomes law he will draft a repeal in the next legislative session. But he pointed out that he would need support from his colleagues in Mississippi’s Republican-dominated senate.

Errick worries an anti-LGBT reputation would hurt the many festivals in this already impoverished Delta region. On 14 June he met Delta mayors and business leaders to discuss the economic impact of HB 1523. Some of Mississippi’s biggest manufacturers – Nissan, Toyota and MGM, for example – came out with statements opposing the legislation before the governor signed the bill in April.

Errick said the city plans to resign a symbolic nondiscrimination resolution: “If you want to come to Greenville, you can come to Greenville.”