The Michigan Legislature is playing a dangerous game of chicken with the children in its care and now Gov. Rick Snyder has exacerbated the danger by signing cynical legislation into law.
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Even worse, it sends Michigan in the exact wrong direction just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court could invalidate all legislative or constitutional provisions that permit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Should that happen, this statute, along with bigoted laws in states around the country, would fall like their predecessors Jim Crow-era laws and regulations after landmark rulings in the 1960s.
That's lousy moral company for Michigan to keep. It's lousy business company for Michigan to keep. And it's especially shameful for a governor whose own preachings about tolerance and acceptance obviously mean less than appeasing his party's religious conservatives.
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But legislation that inculcates the very discrimination that the high court is likely to squash, and does it in the name of religious freedom, is as wrong-headed as the desperate attempts in the 1960s to carve out religious exceptions to racial bias. It won't work. It embarrasses us all. And it sacrifices the interests of children to make a small-minded point about the nobility of bigotry.
This is the low point to which the state has sunk today, thanks to elected officials who either lack the moral decency or the moral courage to stand for equality alongside religious freedom.
