My home state of Georgia is the setting for the latest battle in America’s never-ending culture wars. The event that ignited this fresh fight was Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s decision to fire Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran for, according to the chief’s supporters, expressing his Christian beliefs on homosexuality.
Like more than a few firings, the allegations are many and the agreed upon facts are few. It’s messy and complex — though, for religious liberty advocates, trying to defend Mayor Reed is not an easy task.
Cochran’s firing has prompted proclamations from noted conservative spokespersons such as Albert Mohler, a leading voice for Southern Baptists, who shared his views with a column (offensively) titled “Religious Liberty vs. Erotic Liberty — Religious Liberty is Losing.” Erick Erickson, the Atlanta-based talk radio host and conservative evangelical who The Atlantic dubbed earlier this year as “the most powerful conservative in America,” compared the Atlanta fire chief’s dismissal with the Paris massacre — “And the terrorists won in Atlanta,” he wrote.
Now, at the center of this culture war battle, we have Georgia House Bill 29, also known as the “Preventing Government Overreach on Religious Expression Act.” Supporters claim that the bill is essentially a state version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the bipartisan landmark legislation adopted 20 years ago that requires the federal government to demonstrate a compelling interest to justify substantially burdening the religious freedom of its citizens.
Indeed, HB29 does mostly mirror the federal RFRA. The devil is in the details though, and a group of legal scholars, almost half from Georgia law schools, with expertise in church-state issues and civil rights recently penned a 10-page letter to Georgia Governor Nathan Deal and other state leaders outlining the real problems with this religious freedom bill.
“We all emphatically agree that HB29, as currently drafted, should not be enacted without significant revision,” the law professors wrote. “Here is our message, in simple terms — the timing and broad content of the Bill will invite and legitimate discrimination.”
They explained that the bill could be fixed with a few tweaks, such as amending the bill to “exclude all for-profit business entities, including corporations from coverage as ‘persons’ protected” and adding a provision that explicitly states that the bill does not apply to any laws (federal, state or local) that “prohibit invidious discrimination by public officials, employers, business owners, and those involved in the sale or rental of residential housing.”
Over the past year, conservatives have put cake bakers, florists and wedding photographers front-and-center in the culture war battles that pit religious freedom against gay rights. Yet, rather than specifically protect the cake baker and other wedding service providers, HB29 is written broadly to allow for religious freedom defenses to any commercial transaction covered by a nondiscrimination law — from the sale and rental of housing to services to feed a family or furnish a home, according to the legal scholars. “The possibilities are as endless as the Bill is general,” they write.
Georgia State Representative Sam Teasley (R-Marietta), who introduced HB29, has indicated his plans to explicitly exclude corporations and other for-profit businesses from being covered under the religious freedom bill. However, this would be only a partial fix — to ensure that the bill does not legitimate discrimination, as the scholars noted, the bill should explicitly state that it does not apply to any federal, state or local law designed to protect the residents of Georgia against discrimination.
Anthony Baker, a professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School and signatory to the letter to Georgia’s top elected officials, told me that HB29 “at its broad level is very understandable and appreciated.”
“To draft and approve legislation supporting individual rights of any kind, religious liberties and others, is a good and commendable thing, of value to all Georgians,” Baker said. “However, where, in protecting one set of liberties by legislation, others are implicated and potentially harmed, we are not further ahead.”
With the potential promise of common ground on the horizon, State Rep. Teasley should keep his commitment to exclude corporations from the bill and act on these church-state experts serious concerns and see to it that HB29 doesn’t undermine existing civil rights laws that protect the most vulnerable from discrimination.
Let’s hope that Teasley and his colleagues hear the good-faith objections of religious and business leaders from across the state and aren’t swayed by the Erick Ericksons of the culture wars. Nor should Teasley and his colleague be swayed to inaction and intransigence by those on the left who trade in hyperbole and ominous imagery in order to fundraise.
As I’ve written before, religious freedom should not be used as a wedge issue to divide, and it should not be treated as a political football.
The rights of conscience inalienable are too important.