Brewer's Foolish Veto
It was jarring to read the coverage of the new “anti-gay bill” passed by the Arizona Legislature and then look up the text of the instantly notorious SB 1062. The bill was roughly 998 pages shorter than much of legislation that passes in Washington, so reading it didn’t take much of a commitment. Clocking in at barely two pages, it was easy to scan for disparaging references to homosexuality, for veiled references to homosexuality, for any references to homosexuality at all.They weren’t there. A headline from The Week declared, “There is nothing Christian about Arizona’s anti-gay bill.” It would be more accurate to say that there was nothing anti-gay about Arizona’s anti-gay bill.
The legislation consisted of minor clarifications of the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which has been on the books for 15 years and is modeled on the federal act that passed with big bipartisan majorities in the 1990s and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
Arizona was going to lose the Super Bowl over this? Maybe so. Gov. Jan Brewer took no chances and vetoed it Wednesday. The bill was the subject of a truly awe-inspiring tsunami of poorly informed indignation.
Writing in The Week, Elizabeth Stoker said the logic of the bill “threatens to twist Christianity into a vile, exclusionary isolating thing.” But it was beyond the power of Arizona lawmakers to redefine Christianity. Stoker must have mistaken the Arizona Legislature for the Council of Nicaea.
In USA Today, the influential liberal pundit Kirsten Powers posited that the bill would enable all-out civil conflict, with Muslim pharmacists possibly refusing to give uncovered women antibiotics, Christian pacifists refusing to let Army sergeants stay in their hotels, and Christian restaurateurs who oppose judging gays refusing to serve overly judgmental Christians.
There you have it: If a few lines were changed in Arizona’s religious freedom law, the state would practically become Bosnia-Herzegovina circa 1992. Rarely had so much hinged on a couple of dozen words of an otherwise wholly innocuous statute.
If you’ll excuse a brief, boring break from the hysteria to dwell on the text of the doomed bill, it stipulated that the word “person” in the law applies to businesses and that the protections of the law apply whether or not the government is directly a party to a proceeding (e.g., a lawsuit brought on anti-discrimination grounds).
Eleven legal experts on religious freedom statutes — who represent a variety of views on gay marriage — wrote a letter to Gov. Brewer prior to her veto explaining how the bill “has been egregiously misrepresented by many of its critics.”
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