The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case over a Mississippi law that allows public officials and businesses to deny services to LGBT people on the basis of the service providers’ religious beliefs, a decision that will keep the law in place for the foreseeable future.
The case, Campaign for Southern Equality v. Bryant, challenges HB 1523, the “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act,” which was passed by the state legislature in March 2016.
The law allows clerks, registers of deeds or their deputies to recuse themselves from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples if it violates their religious beliefs or moral convictions. It also protects private businesses and people from being sued if they deny services to LGBT people.
The law provides protections for three religious beliefs: marriage is between a man and a woman, sexual relations are “properly reserved to such a marriage,” and one’s gender is determined by “anatomy and genetics at time of birth.”
A U.S. district judge struck down the law in June 2016, ruling it violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
But a three-judge panel for the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year the plaintiffs failed to show how they have been or will be harmed by the law, and reversed an injunction that blocked the law from going into effect. The Mississippi law was then allowed to take effect in October.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative law firm that had lawyers on the legal team representing Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, praised the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case.
“We are pleased that the Supreme Court declined to take up these baseless challenges, which misrepresented the law’s sole purpose of ensuring that Mississippians don’t live in fear of losing their careers or their businesses simply for affirming marriage as a husband-wife union,” said Kevin Theriot, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom. “Those who haven’t been and won’t be harmed by this law shouldn’t be allowed to restrict freedom for others by ensuring dissenters are left open to the government discrimination that has already occurred in states without protective laws like this one.”
But opponents of the law worried it would lead to discrimination of LGBT people and vowed to continue working to reverse the Mississippi law.
“We will keep fighting in Mississippi until we overturn this harmful law, and in any state where anti-gay legislators pass laws to roll back LGBT civil rights,” said Beth Littrell, counsel in the southern regional office of Lambda Legal. “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s decision today leaves LGBT people in Mississippi in the crosshairs of hate and humiliation, delaying justice and equality.”
