So here is a rant filled with my amateur legal opinions.
To understand this law and the people that passed, you should understand a little bit about the Indiana state legislature. First of all, they don't represent every citizen. Next, I consider Indiana to be a one-party state at this point. Even the Democrats have to be Conservative Light in order to elected to state-wide office. The Republicans have gerrymandered the districts so effectively, that they basically guaranteed themselves control the legislature indefinitely. Now that they don't have to worry about actually listening to the people because they always will run the state, they basically sell out to the corporations. And this legislature is overwhelming old, white, Christian men and women that mainly represent conservative suburbs, smalls towns, and rural areas.
The majority of voters in Indiana is not actually Republicans; they are majority apathetic. Rarely you will ever have a majority of the voting population actually go the polls in the election. In the mid-term elections last November, Indiana had the lowest voter turnout IN THE COUNTRY. So most of the population doesn't give two sh!ts because they feel voting is meaningless, and the minority of the population that goes to the polls most votes Republican, except for the people in Indianapolis, northwest Indiana near Chicago, the college towns, and maybe a couple other places. But remember that most of us Hoosiers don't give a sh!t because we feel that we are getting screwed regardless of who runs the show.
This is just a sample of the incredibly dumb nonsense that is introduced into the legislature every year. Now this frickin law. Nowhere does it say anything about discriminating against the LBGT community. But there are many religions that do not accept people in the LGBT community, and the law says that "a governmental entity may not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion, even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability." So a person can exercise their religion freely. Sounds good, right? But not if the exercise of religious is discriminatory in a public arena.
To summarize some of the important legalese in the law, the religious person becomes a protected class and the government entity must prove that they can only burden a person's exercise of religion if the burden is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest and is the least restrictive was of furthering that compelling governmental interest.
Translation: a person can do whatever the f*ck they want to exercise their religion unless the governmental entity can prove that restricting their practice of religion is conflicting with compelling government interest, whatever that means. This law basically establishes a protected class that is allowed to discriminate on the basis their religious beliefs, and the burden is on others to prove that they are discriminatory, rather than the burden on the discriminating person. F*ck. This. Sh!t. Then the law has more stuff about handing out freebies to the religious person if it is found that the governmental entity did not demonstrating they rightfully burdened a person's exercise of religion.
In an ideal world, one of the purposes of government is to protect the individual against the tyranny of the majority, the minority, and any other group. On the surface, it looks like this law is protecting a person that simply wishes to exercise their religious beliefs. Implicitly, as many news organizations have stated, this law protects a group that wishes to discriminate against one of the protected classes (race, color, gender, sexual orientation, etc), in the name of religious. So I can start a religion tomorrow with a couple of my buddies, say that doing business with redheads is against our religion, and now the plaintiff and a government entity have to prove that they can substantially burden my exercise of religion only if the burden to me is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest. What exactly is a compelling governmental interest, the courts will figure that out.
What's gonna happen is that affected parties will take this nonsense to the courts, and hopefully the courts will overturn this on a basis of a violation of some civil rights laws. This language looks so legally flimsy, that I can't see it holding up. We'll see. Now if a real lawyer wants to swoop in and tell me I'm wrong, go ahead, because I probably am wrong about some things.
I would like to start on a new religion here in Indiana and just start hating on all kinds of people because this law will protect me until I'm messing with "the furtherance of a compelling governmental interest." These 150 people in our legislature do not represent all Indiana residents. The city government of Indianapolis, many, many businesses, and nearly everyone I know have already spoken their opposition to this law.
This whole things represents a total lack of acceptance for the diversity of humanity that populate this city, state, and planet. Now you can say that opponents of the law are not being accepting of different religious beliefs. But your religious beliefs systematically discriminate against a class of people in a public arena for some bullsh!t reason, I have plenty of reason to not like this individual and their religious beliefs.
