What Is With Tennessee?

The religious right is crying that they are persecuted and prevented from practicing their religious right to discriminate. We have seen awful laws being proposed to allow businesses to be able to discriminate if it violates their religious beliefs and the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby case that could have disastrous effect on all civil rights laws.

In Tennessee they just passed a new bill that is now on the governor's desk to end religious persecution in schools,

Tennessee Sends Religious Anti-Discrimination Bill To Governor
The Huffington Post
By Shadee Ashtari
Posted: 03/25/2014

Tennessee lawmakers approved a bill on Monday that seeks to expand religious liberty protections for students in public schools.

The Religious Viewpoints Anti-Discrimination Act, which passed the state Senate 32-0, would permit students to express religious beliefs in their homework, artwork and written and oral assignments without academic punishment or discrimination.

The legislation’s primary sponsors, state Rep. Courtney Rogers (R) and Sen. Ferrell Haile (R), introduced the measure after a teacher asked a 10-year-old student to choose a subject other than God to write about as the person she admired most, according to the Associated Press. The state House passed the bill earlier this month by a vote of 90-2.

That ACLU said that this bill will,

But this bill also encourages religious coercion, requiring local school boards to establish a system for selecting student speakers and allow those students to express their beliefs about religion in a variety of inappropriate settings, from the classroom to school-day assemblies and school events. Should this pass, students with a range of religious beliefs, as well as non-believers, would likely routinely be required to listen to religious messages or participate in religious exercises that conflict with their own beliefs.

This bill seems to me as an end run around teaching religion in schools, this allows a student to expound their beliefs to their classmates. I think this is aimed at the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students, tell me what will happen when a student makes racist comments about blacks or comments about Jews and Muslims and claims that they are just exercising their religious tenets?