Despite Mike Pence and Asa Hutchinson folding like cheap suits, not everyone has given up on the cause of religious freedom. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is hitting the problem head on. A bill called the Marriage and Conscience Act is now working its way through the Louisiana legislature and Jindal has said he will sign it. This bill is a significant and welcome departure from the weak sauce passed in Indiana and Arkansas which merely give (or in the case of Indiana, gave) private citizens the ability to use religious conscience as a defense in a private lawsuit of the type homosexual fascists have been employing against Christians in Colorado, New Mexico, and other places. Via the Washington Post:

“This bill is worse than any RFRA in that it explicitly allows discrimination based on an individual’s religious beliefs about marriage,” [HRC legal director Sarah Warbelow] said. “Nobody gets to go into court for a balancing test, there’s no interpretation by a state judicial system. It flat-out gives individuals a right to discriminate, period.”

Umm, no. What it does is allow a person to publicly practice their faith without fear of being sued into penury by the gaystapo. More to the point, discrimination is pretty much what defines a free society. What made Jim Crow so odious was not discrimination, per se, but rather the requirement that you discriminate whether you wanted to or not and the fact that the government was involved in furthering discrimination. As Ace observes:

Unlike some other Dummies, I’m not really of a mind that we must all Follow the Same Rules and all Subscribe to the Same Bland, Grey, Dead Corporate-Friendly Culture in which no one is really religious or different or odd at all Because That’s Bad For Corporate Business.

I think people should have — and by God, do have — the right to be fairly different from one another.

That’s ****ing America.

Did you not know that? That that’s what America is?

That America is the right to be different from other people?

I don’t see why a store run by a pious conservative Muslim can’t demand that women be covered, if that’s his bag, nor why a store run by a pious conservative Catholic can’t also insist that women cover their shoulders, if that’s his sense of what his business should be, of what should happen on property he owns.

Will there be hurt feelings when some are turned away?

Sure.

And who cares?

What the f*** are we, babies? Is this kindergarten, where everyone must be made to feel welcome, always?

Why the f*** would you think I would even care about this s***? Is it because you care about it so much, that you are so concerned about maintaining a Standard Generic Vanilla Corporate-Friendly Non-Culture Culture everywhere, that the idea of a Muslim religious bookstore which insists on a strict dress code for women is mentally deranging?

Your ability to engage in the bizarre institution of homosexual marriage is not affected in any way by my unwillingness to be involve. Just as I have the right to not choose a homosexual baker or florist or photographer (and I must admit that until a couple of years ago the thought would never have crossed my mind but now there is no way I’d ever do business or have non-mandatory-business-related social interaction with anyone I knew to be homosexual) for my event, I have the right as a vendor to not participate in a cruel parody of marriage.

Interestingly the same Washington Post article observes:

Polling suggests that could — emphasis on could — be more popular and more difficult for opponents to beat back. Critics can’t as easily point to the possibility of the vague language leading to unintended discrimination, and polling shows half or more of voters support exempting religious businesses from serving gay weddings. A March 2014 Washington Post-ABC News poll found only 28 percent believe businesses should be able to refuse service to gay and lesbian people in general because of religious belief, but a January AP-GfK poll found 57 percent believe that wedding-related businesses should be able to refuse service. (A later Pew poll put it at 47 percent.)

Good for Bobby Jindal in supporting this effort. And as Mike Pence and Asa Hutchinson mourn amid the ashes of their political futures, I hope they have time to contemplate the fact that it was easily avoidable if they had simply done what was right.