“You can’t sit with us!” Gretchen Wieners screams across the table at Regina George. The veins on Gretchen’s forehead pop out in indignation.
This scene is one of the most iconic from Tina Fey’s Mean Girls, quoted comically to tease friends who deviate from the socially predetermined standard. So why am I referencing it now? Because this temper tantrum is exactly what Arizona’s legislature said business owners across the state can do to its homosexual citizens.
Last week, Arizona’s legislature passed S.B.1062, which grants businesses the right to deny service to anyone if it is based on religious grounds. But the bill was designed to counteract same-sex marriage rulings that may arise in Arizona in the future, which makes this measure no better than those from the days of Jim Crow Laws.
Jim Crow Laws legally justified racial segregation and the right of businesses to deny or give inferior service to colored people across the nation. Segregation was done in service to society, to God for goodness sake—or so all the “good, pious Christians” said. Decades later, the same excuse is being used in the creation of new discriminatory bills across the nation.
And just recently, Arizona had a new bill that was little different from a Jim Crow Law with the words “colored people” crossed out and replaced with “anyone I don’t like” in the margin.
When I heard about the bill, I imagined my mother choking on her coffee—remembering all the things she’d done for the civil rights movement. I thought of all the times her family was reassigned in Alabama because my reverend grandfather preached equality, all the times they were threatened by the KKK members in their congregation, all the tears she’d shed when trying to instill in me the idea that the best way to serve God is to not withhold love from anyone. Honestly, I thought about what all the activists in the civil rights movement were thinking about with this new Arizona bill and what it could lead to for another group of oppressed people.
These activists fought to prove that religious beliefs weren’t good enough excuses to abuse people, that hatred and alienation don’t flow from God, but from sin. They showed that you can’t pick and choose Bible verses to justify “religious actions”—you can’t stone your adulterous wife, you can’t execute your teenager for being a smart ass, for God’s sake you can’t alienate your neighbor for being a ginger. Besides being outdated and cruel, many of these Biblical rules are kept out of our laws because of the separation of church and state. Doesn’t making a group of people second-class citizens count as blurring this line? We could make all these allowances in the name of religion, but we don’t—because it would be immoral, ironically enough.
But according to the Arizona State Senate, you can conjecture about someone’s sexual orientation, or anything in particular, and refuse to serve them, if you can prove it’s for religious reasons. Here’s what they haven’t answered: How will you know if someone is gay or bisexual—by keeping a registry of the state’s homosexual citizens? Would business owners be allowed to presume someone’s sexual orientation, or if they’re a divorcee, or deny them service based on race if their excuse seems plausible enough?
In truth, we can respect people’s religious beliefs without allowing them to perform wrongdoings. And when Governor Jan Brewer (R-Az.) and the United States’ other Christian politicians are trying to pick and choose verses to sneak into Arizona law, I hope they remember that, to Jesus, the most important laws of all were to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and … Love your neighbor as yourself.” Luckily, Gov. Brewer saw this truth when she vetoed the bill in Arizona on Wednesday, despite the fact that its legislators still voted for it. If politicians in other states do this when the bill arrives in their legislatures, they will see that the only religious option is to vote against it, and business owners will see the beauty in breaking bread with God’s children, great and small.
God’s greatest gift of all was love, not hate. Love lets us grow and prevents us from becoming cold, hard plastic. Without it, you’re just a Mean Girl, Arizona.
Homosexuality discrimination is nothing like Jim Crow Laws. And it is a shame that the homosexual agenda is being allowed to attach itself to the struggles of black people here in America.