Bigotry claps its hands: Phil Bryant, Republican Governor of Mississippi

That noxious, hateful law, HB 1523, passed by Mississippi Republicans and signed Tuesday by an equally noxious Republican governor, Phil Bryant, is described as allowing businesses to “refuse service” to gay people, which conjures up visions of gay customers being carefully sized up and “politely” turned away from restaurants or small businesses that have suddenly “seen the light" and discovered their “religion” provides them an excuse to marginalize and “teach a lesson" to folks they disapprove of.

And the Mississippi law really does provide a “freedom” of sorts—the freedom to openly express your outright disdain, disapproval and intolerance for “others” you’d prefer didn’t exist at all, without fear of pesky legal consequences. That is the heart of its appeal. It piles on to the license to discriminate already adopted by the state in its 2014 “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” permitting businesses the right to fire and otherwise humiliate people based on their sexual orientation. The new law goes even further-- it legitimizes the public punishment of such people, satisfying a base craving for certain personality types, by taking away people’s ability to defend themselves through the state’s laws:

The legislation, HB 1523, promises that the state government will not punish people who refuse to provide services to people because of a religious opposition to same-sex marriage, extramarital sex or transgender people.

By doing this the law effectively makes the state an accomplice, a passive agent of the “punishment,” permitting no avenue of escape from a suffocating environment of hate. But it also does a whole lot more.

The way this law is written, food markets can refuse to sell you food if you’re gay, without fear of repercussions from the state. A restaurant can hang its “No Gays allowed” policy at the front door. A employer can refuse to hire you if you’re gay. If you’re a transgender high school student, the principal can deny you access to the bathroom of your choice and keep you from sharing a locker room with others in gym class. He can bar you from going to the school dance.

You can be prohibited from buying or renting a home if you’re gay, and you can be evicted if your landlord finds out you’re gay. If you have HIV, a pharmacist can deny you medication. The law goes even farther and explicitly nullifies transgender people’s existence, essentially turning them into non-entities in the eyes of the state.

And it’s not only gay , bisexual or transgender people who are targeted by this law:

This law not only protects discrimination against LGBT people, but against any person who has sex outside of marriage. It also makes it easier for employers and schools to strictly police the way you dress to make sure it’s masculine or feminine enough. If your boss thinks proper ladies wear make-up, he can cite “religious freedom” as a reason to force you to do so, and the law will protect him for it.

This means, if you’re a woman you can be fired by your employer for not wearing a dress. Or if you’re not dolled up enough to satisfy his—ahem—“religious” preferences. Observe the overwhelming bias of this law toward accommodating men’s desires and fears, and the truth of the matter becomes much clearer.

Eddie Glaude, now Chairman of the Department of African-American studies at Princeton University, grew up in Mississippi. Writing for Time magazine, Glaude calls the Mississippi law “Bigotry draped in the garb of religion,” and sees a direct parallel between the current law and laws passed in Mississippi in 1964, including an infamous law (HB 180) which criminalized illegitimacy and originally sought to provide sterilization or prison terms for the parents of illegitimate (and overwhelmingly African-American) children of Mississippi:

The motivation for the bill was a so-called moral concern over sex outside the bounds of marriage. Such acts had to be policed and punished. Religious piety demanded as much. The true motivation was something more insidious.

The “true motivation” (revealed in the floor debates on the Bill itself) was to “punish” what was seen as the “immorality” of African Americans, a way of exercising raw power over those they otherwise hated and feared. There’s no fundamental difference in motivation between those racist laws and the new laws targeting gays and transgender people. It’s not any sense of “morality” or religious “piety” that drives attempts to marginalize gay people, it’s the simple desire to demean, diminish, and punish them for who they are. In other words, religion itself is only a fig leaf, an excuse for the “free” exercise of pure, unadulterated bigotry, the same type of poison with a new name seeping out of Mississippi that reared its head so many decades ago, against a different, but equally hated, minority. As Glaude says, then and now “Mississippi is a metaphor for America. It is and has always been that. The state simply exaggerates tendencies found elsewhere in the country:”

But this bill isn’t about anti-discrimination. The reasoning is all too familiar. We see it in the obsession about the sexual lives of black and poor people informing HB 180 in 1964. This isn’t about religious freedom, either. It is bigotry draped in the garb of religion. Plain and simple. And it should be fought with all of our political and moral energy. What is clear is the narrowness and mean-spiritedness of those who support such a bill. And they aren’t alone. We hear it in our political discourse everyday.

And Republicans are intent on ensuring that what happens in Mississippi doesn’t stay in Mississippi. Their Presidential candidate Ted Cruz has made these “religious liberty bills” the cornerstone of his campaign, setting up "religious liberty councils” to provide ”advice” on how to spread this type of intolerance on a national level:

The council ...recommends that Cruz “direct all federal agencies to stop interpreting ‘sex’ to include ‘sexual orientation’ and/or ‘gender identity.'” This would gut essential protections that LGBT people — and particularly members of the transgender community — are relying on. Victims of discrimination in employment and education have successfully found relief based on these interpretations of the law, and that protection would be eviscerated.

Nor does Cruz limit his agenda of intolerance to LGBT people:

His “religious liberty” advisers would have him “direct the Department of Health and Human Services to eliminate its requirement that all employers include coverage for all FDA-approved contraceptive methods and sterilization procedures.” This would make it even harder for women to access birth control than the Hobby Lobby case has already made it.

What kind of twisted God would get His jollies off of denying others basic food, shelter, and health care out of pure spite has never been explained in these “Religious Freedom” laws like the one Mississippi just passed. What is clear is that people have relied on “religion” to justify all sorts of bullying and intolerant behavior throughout history, and that’s not going to change any time soon, even in 2016 America.