On Tuesday I gave you all the rundown about how federal RFRA drafter Michael Farris admitted that he intended the law to legalize religiously motivated discrimination against LGBT people. Farris went on Tuesday’s episode of the Hannity Show and once again stated that he believes that people have the right to discriminate.
I was waiting to see if Fox was going to post the video of the segment to their website, but since it looks like they aren’t going to, here’s my shaky video recorded off of the TV. Sorry that I don’t have any fancy dancy video capture equipment to give you a better video, blame Verizon for putting a bunch of DRM on their DVRs. The question about discrimination starts around 2:20 in the video after the jump.
The bottom line here is that Farris believes that as long as you can cloak it in religious beliefs, discrimination against LGBT people should be allowed. He’s focusing on cakes and flowers now, but as I pointed out the other day, he think that discrimination should extend to housing and employment discrimination.
Incidentally, the organization Farris founded, HSLDA, officially opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). Taking a policy position on ENDA is a rather severe example of mission drift for an organization that exists to defend homeschooling, which goes to show just how seriously they take their right to discriminate against LGBT people.
Another interesting bit of information comes to us in the form of a note Farris posted to Facebook on Wednesday evening. (as usual, screenshotted since these things have a way of disappearing).
On its face this looks to be a short little anecdote about how some nice homeschool moms went to the Indiana capitol to pray with the poor embattled legislators (implicit in this is the contrasting idea that the law’s opponents are not so nice and polite). Read this closely and see if you notice the same thing I did.
Did you catch it?
It looks like a just throwaway parenthetical, but that very last line is important.
“I didn’t hear this from a homeschool mom but one of the legislators.”
See what he just told us with that line? That he, the one who has gone on record repeatedly that he intended RFRA to legalize religiously motivated discrimination, has been communicating with the legislators who passed Indiana’s law. The law that they’re all busy swearing up and down isn’t discriminatory and they never intended it to be discriminatory.
It’s a wee bit harder to play dumb about the bill’s discriminatory nature when you’re in communication with the guy who drafted the original one and has been running around telling anyone who will listen that he intended RFRA to be discriminatory.
You can claim all you want to that your law passes constitutional muster because it doesn’t mention LGBT people at all, but when you’re trumpeting from the rooftops that you intended to legalize discrimination against LGBT people, that’s when the courts sit up and take notice.