Conservative lawmakers doubling down on discrimination policies with religious ‘conscience protection’ as workers and students fear ‘for their very lives’

When Jennifer Rambo got engaged in Arkansas last year, she wasn’t an activist seeking to make history. But when a temporary court ruling made way for her nuptials, her fiancee “didn’t want to miss the opportunity”.

So they moved up their wedding date, and Jennifer and Kristin Seaton-Rambo did end up making history, as the first gay couple married in this former heart of the confederacy when it became the first southern US state to allow same-sex marriage – albeit for just a week in May.

“Now that we’ve been all over the news,” Jennifer told the Guardian last week, she is concerned about her sexual orientation being used against her when she graduates from university and begins looking for work. More immediately, she is concerned for her family, whom she feared could be “discriminated against just for being seen being supportive of us”.

Such is life being out in the American south, where discrimination exacts a daily toll, and especially in Arkansas, where a circuitous route to LGBT equality now appears to be operating in reverse as anti-gay legislation pushes already vulnerable citizens further to the margins.

As gay marriage bans fall, LGBT rights come under fire from state legislatures Read more

As of last week, it is legal in Arkansas not to protect against LGBT discrimination in the workplace. Officially, Senate Bill 202 forbids localities from passing civil-protections ordinances for traits not already covered by law, such as race, gender or religion. But since Arkansas’s civil-rights laws – like those in most US states – do not include protections for LGBT citizens from being discriminated in employment, education or housing, the new law stopped even local governments from offering any such protections when Governor Asa Hutchinson declined to veto it.

“The federal government understands we have certain rights, but our fucking state wants to strip them away,” said Kenny Abner, who works for a healthcare provider.

Looking down the bar at Six Ten, one of the very few gay watering holes in Little Rock, Arkansas’s biggest city, Abner says Republicans, who normally champion local control, have “suddenly forgotten that”. “No one seemed to see this backlash coming,” says his friend, Cornelius Mabin, from across the bar. Mabin says he is worried about how the bill will affect HIV/Aids, given how dangerous the disease is across the American south even before SB 202 added to what Mabin called “the racism, homophobia and stigma we already face”.

“My straight friends are appalled,” Abner said. “This is not a gay thing. It’s a rights thing.”

A gay man who asked not to be named described working as an aircraft manufacturing technician in a “blue-collar environment”. The man said if he was totally out, colleagues and superiors would “question my integrity, which would make them question my integrity in my job”.

Other LGBT Arkansans said they are confident in a future with full-on marriage equality and anti-discrimination policies from major corporations. (Walmart came out against SB 202, but the Arkansas-based retailer did not use its considerable political influence as the largest private employer in the country until after the law passed.) But they remain concerned that legislators here and across the American south were declaring a quiet war on queer Arkansans working for locally owned businesses, or without access to any work or even shelter at all – indeed, against people whose very gender identity makes them likely victims of violence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 19 Kids and Counting stars Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar helped to defeat the Fayetteville measure. Photograph: Wikimedia Commons

A pattern for big-footing civil rights, from the Duggars to the statehouses

Just three months after Arkansas started and stopped handing out marriage licenses to LGBT couples last year, Fayetteville – a college town that is also home to thousands of employees from Walmart’s nearby headquarters – passed a landmark non-discrimination ordinance of its own.

One impetus for passing the local measure, said Fayetteville city council member Mark Kinion, was to make sure all LGBT citizens enjoyed the kinds of employment protections he was afforded at the pharmaceutical manufacturer SmithKline before he retired.

But Kinion, who is openly gay, said his employer’s protections were “limited”, that there was “still discrimination” on the job, and that Fayetteville’s ordinance went beyond the workplace and extended to “everyone, especially the transgender community”.

“One of the most heinous murders we ever had was of a black transgender lady, who was beaten to death by a hammer so severely there was tissue from one side of the house to the other,” Kinoin said, referring to the 1998 death of Rita Hester.

Local government should be focusing, he said, on protecting LGBT people not just at the workplace but “for their safety, for their very lives”.

Fayetteville citizens overturned the city council’s anti-discrimination measure by a direct vote in December, aided by a high-profile political push from the Duggars, the family behind the wildly popular reality show 19 Kids and Counting. Now that the legislature in Little Rock has banned every locality like Fayetteville from passing similar protections statewide, a pattern for big-footing civil rights has been set: anti-discrimination rollbacks are in the works inside statehouses from Kansas to Florida, and citizens across the Bible belt are concerned that conservative state legislators won’t let localised efforts get in their way.

A model for doubling down on discrimination, from the Bible to the basement

In the basement of Little Rock’s First Presbyterian Church, 18-year-old Violet Gresham and 17-year-old Savannah Rayne spend a lot of time at Diverse Youth for Social Change, a group that creates a safe space for young queer people to hang out and create their own programs. It is part of the Center for Artistic Revolution, which also maintains a clothing closet in the basement, for young trans people to pick up bras, binders or gender-appropriate fashion.

Violet Gresham.

Gresham, who identifies as transgender, has been largely successful in getting teachers to use the name “Violet” and the pronoun “they”. But Gresham is concerned that the word “it” might be used more frequently about a human being, if a religious exemption bill – separate from the anti-discrimination bill that became law last week – allows teachers and employers to claim their beliefs as a reason for discriminating against LGBT people.

Last Wednesday at the Little Rock statehouse, the Arkansas state senate’s judiciary committee did not endorse the sweeping religious “conscience protection” bill, known as HB 1228, after it passed the Arkansas house. (The same day, the senate committee also considered a bill to ban sharia law in Arkansas.)

“If I wanted a job, I’d have to take out my piercings, act more masculine and act like a male,” Gresham said of the legislation.

Savannah Rayne.

Rayne’s parents are both seriously ill and she needs to help support her family by working in her spare time away from her junior year in high school. She says she lost a job after telling a colleague she is queer: “A month later we got a new manager, and she was a very devout Christian, and – they kind of fired me.”

With the potential for a religious-exemption law to double down on the statewide anti-discrimination rollback, Rayne feared “that a teacher has the possibility to say, ‘I don’t want you in my classroom’, because I identify as queer and I’m out.”.

“I care about gay rights,” Rayne said, “but I care more about queer justice.”