Idiots In Charge Of The Hen House!

Don’t the legislators know how idiotic the laws they are trying to pass are?

In Tennessee, Kansas, and Kentucky the state legislatures have introduced bills that would allow businesses to discrimination against LGBT people if it violates their religious beliefs.

Queerty writes this about the Kansas bill,

This proposal was meant to prevent private businesses from being forced to serve customers when they don’t want to do so, i.e., a baker who makes wedding cakes wouldn’t be forced to make a wedding cake for a same-gender wedding ceremony. Yes, the Kansas government debated the legal and moral implications of wedding cake. Why is everyone obsessed with wedding cake?

Then it morphed into “protecting” government employees from being forced to do things that go against their religious beliefs. Although as a public employee publicly serving the public, with public money paying your public salary, that ALWAYS has been, is, and will be a component of the job. Imagine if the clerks at the DMV wouldn’t have to serve people they don’t like. They don’t like anybody. But we’ll let that go for now.

Yesterday the bill passed the House with a vote of 72 to 49 and it now goes to the Republican controlled Senate. Meanwhile Fox news in Memphis reports that,

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (FOX13) -

A new bill was recently introduced in the Tennessee State Legislature that, if passed, would allow people and businesses to refuse to provide goods and services to homosexuals.
[...]
The bill notes that businesses can refuse services and goods only if it furthers a civil union, domestic partnership, or same-sex marriage. The person or business would just have to say it was against their religion. For example, if a same-sex couple wanted a cake for their wedding reception, a bakery could refuse to cater to them.

Then to finish off the triple play, back in March Kentucky another article in Queerty saids,

We honored Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear as Badass of the Week for vetoing a bill on Friday that would have allowed individuals to ignore almost any state law that conflicted with their religious convictions.
[…]
House Bill 279 protects “sincerely held religious beliefs” from being infringed upon unless there is “a compelling governmental interest.” (Translation: Expect a lot of lawsuits.) The measure has clear implications for LGBT Kentuckians, who could be fired or evicted under the mask of religious freedom.

The first thought that pops into my head is, how are they going to determine who is gay? If two brothers come into a restaurant and the owner thinks that they are gay, can he legally refuse to serve them?

Also I seem to remember something little thing called the First Amendment, something about “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” It seems to me that when you give a religious preference by not having to obey a law that is a violation of the First Amendment. Some will argue that the First Amendment also says, “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” but the courts have time and time again said that if a law does not specially target a religion it doesn’t violate the First Amendment. Say a religion uses marijuana as a religious sacrament and the laws ban possessions of marihuana, the courts have said that ban does not infringe upon their First Amendment rights.