“Excruciatingly Different” Mississippi Religious Lib Law Specifies Beliefs

The Mississippi “religious liberty” law that will soon allow public officials to refuse service to same-sex couples and transgender individuals was hit with two legal challenges last week, one by the ACLU and the other by the Campaign for Southern Equality. Both suits argue the law, HB 1523, violates the constitutional protections laid down by the Supreme Court in last year’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which it clearly does. But it also brazenly violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from unduly favoring one religion over another. Mississippi’s law, which protects only three specific religiously-based beliefs (that marriage should be between men and women only, that sex outside of marriage is immoral, and that gender and sex are only determined by anatomy at birth), is “excruciatingly different” from most generic state religious freedom laws, according to Andrew Seidel, constitutional attorney at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc....
http://religiondispatches.org/excruciatingly-different-mississippi-religious-lib-law-specifies-beliefs/