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Florida Lawmaker Proposes Expansive Bill To Allow Discrimination Against LGBT People
Florida lawmakers have not given up on passing legislation that enables discrimination against the LGBT community. State Rep. Julio Gonzalez (R) has introduced a new bill that specifically empowers businesses, health providers, and child placement agencies to refuse any service to any customer if it would violate their “religious or moral convictions.”
HB 401 specifically references Florida’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), first passed in 1998, but builds upon it to ensure the use of religious beliefs to justify discrimination. Here are the three main categories of discrimination it aims to license:
- Any health care facility, ambulatory surgery center, nursing home, assisted living facility, extended congregate care facility, or hospice is “not required to administer, recommend or deliver a medical treatment or procedure that would be contrary to the religious or moral convictions or policies of the facility or health care provider.”
- Any person, closely held organization (small/family-run business), religious institution, or business owned or operated by a religious institution is “not required to produce, create, or deliver a product or service that would be contrary to the religious or moral convictions” of the person or organization.
- Any private child-placing agency is “not required to perform, assist in, recommend, consent to, or participate in the placement of a child that would be contrary to the religious or moral convictions or policies of the agency.”
In all three cases, the bill exempts the discriminating individual or organization from any liability for the refusal of service, and also ensures that such refusal “does not form the basis for any disciplinary or other recriminatory action” against them.
Though the bill does not include any LGBT-specific reference, Gonzalez specifically highlighted to the Herald Tribune the examples of wedding vendors that been found in violation of nondiscrimination laws when refusing service to same-sex couples. “We have seen in other states the bakers, the photographers who don’t want to participate in certain religious events,” he said.
“This is not about discriminating,” he insisted. “This is making sure the state stops, at a narrowly crafted level, from intruding into somebody’s liberties.” This is despite the fact that the bill empowers refusals of service in ways much more explicit than similarly controversial bills considered earlier this year in Indiana and Arkansas.
Gonzalez’s bill follows just six months after the Florida House overwhelmingly voted for a bill that would have specifically enabled discrimination by child-placement agencies. Opponents of that bill offered several amendments to specifically ensure the bill’s identical protections of “religious or moral convictions” could not be used to discriminate, but those amendments were repeatedly voted down. Fortunately, the bill died shortly thereafter in the Senate Rules Committee.
The post Florida Lawmaker Proposes Expansive Bill To Allow Discrimination Against LGBT People appeared first on ThinkProgress.
Zack Ford
thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/10/22/3714990/florida-license-to-discriminate/
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