Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder enacted laws this week that tear down the wall between church and state.
Even as we prepare for what could be a historic Supreme Court ruling at the end of the month, we got a glimpse this week of the right wing's new post-marriage strategy. Lawmakers in Michigan and North Carolina both enacted legislation that sanctions taxpayer-funded discrimination.
In North Carolina, court officials will now have the right to refuse to perform marriage ceremonies or provide marriage licenses to virtually any couple that offends their religious beliefs. The law—which was originally introduced after a federal court struck down North Carolina's ban on same-sex marriage—was certainly targeted at same-sex couples. But the exemption is not limited to them. So now it's open season for the state's magistrates to pass moral judgement on anyone—women who are pregnant, divorcées, interracial couples ... the sky's the limit!
In Michigan, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, who had pledged to veto a religious freedom bill two months earlier, reneged and signed into law several measures that allow government-funded agencies to deny services to people on religious grounds.
The LGBT legal organization Lambda Legal declared the new laws, in some ways, "worse" than Indiana's "religious freedom" law because they endorse and promote taxpayer-funded discrimination (i.e. LGBT Americans in those states will be financing discrimination against themselves). Lambda Legal immediately offered up its help desk for anyone who becomes a victim of these laws, as did the ACLU.
"We encourage any family looking to adopt or foster children who believe they will be adversely affected by this law to contact us immediately," the ACLU's Rana Elmir said. "The agencies that are subject to HB 4188-4190 are receiving state money and are therefore agents of the state. Agencies have a legal obligation to ensure the best interests of the child are considered during placement."
The legal groups will surely bring challenges to both laws—an important step in a process that will take years to complete. But what happens in the meantime? Judging from this week's events, we'll see an erosion of the wall that once stood between church and state. Head below the fold for more.
Before North Carolina's GOP governor, Pat McCrory, was overruled by his state legislature, he originally tried to keep that wall in place. When he vetoed the legislation last month, despite the fact that he doesn't support marriage equality, he noted:
"No public official who voluntarily swears to support and defend the Constitution and to discharge all duties of their office should be exempt from upholding that oath."
But where McCrory took the high road (and his legislature defied him), Snyder did the opposite. He justified government-sanctioned discrimination through fearmongering—suggesting that without the laws, faith-based adoption agencies would be forced to close. From his
statement:
"[The bills] do not change current practices in Michigan, but prevent faith-based agencies from having policies forced on them that violate their religious beliefs, which have resulted in agencies closing in Massachusetts, Illinois, California, and Washington, D.C."
Gov. Snyder's decision likely wasn't inspired by his own religious beliefs—he's not a firebrand social conservative in the vein of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. So it's hard to know whether Snyder actually succumbed to pressure from faith-based adoption agencies that threatened to close, or whether he caved to other political forces and then used their potential closure as a justification for enacting the laws.
But any way you slice it, he's given faith-based organizations that receive state funds free rein to decide who's a fit parent and who's unfit based on subjective moral criteria. Those agencies soak up about half of Michigan's adoption funding.
In the 2014-15 budget year, $19.9 million in state and federal funds went toward supporting agencies for adoption and foster care services, according to the state Department of Human Services. Nearly $10 million of that total went to faith-based agencies that would be covered under the religious objection bills.
Just like in North Carolina, while Michigan's new laws were targeted squarely at
same-sex couples, their reach will not stop there. Both states have opened up a new frontier on breaking down the separation between government and faith-based institutions.
It's not a frontier Americans are likely to support—the vast majority of the nation doesn't even support giving private business owners a license to discriminate against gays on religious grounds. Just this week, a Public Religion Research Institute poll found that 60 percent of Americans oppose letting small business owners deny service to LGBT people based on their personally held religious beliefs. That included strong majorities of both Catholics and Protestants.
But researchers didn't even think to ask voters how they felt about allowing publicly-funded agents of the government to refuse services to people.
Unfortunately, America might wake up one day to find such laws have swept the country. As LGBT journalist Michelangelo Signorile has reported, the Christian right has been looking for an anti-LGBT issue to advance state-by-state—much like its partial-birth abortion strategy—in the wake of a Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. And if there's one thing we know about the Christian right based on how they've chipped away at Roe v. Wade, they will stop at nothing to achieve their ends.