Jindal: Sure, let's do what Indiana did. That seemed to work out.
It looks like Louisiana thinks they have solved the problem with the Indiana and Arkansas "religious freedoms" bills that have caused so much bad press and turmoil in those states.
Those bills, you see, were overly broad, allowing critics to paint them possibly discriminatory. Louisiana will solve this problem
by being openly discriminatory.
Louisiana's Marriage and Conscience Act is more focused and deals specifically with religious beliefs in relation to same-sex marriage. [...]
"This bill is worse than any RFRA in that it explicitly allows discrimination based on an individual's religious beliefs about marriage," [HRC legal director Sarah Warbelow] said. "Nobody gets to go into court for a balancing test, there's no interpretation by a state judicial system. It flat-out gives individuals a right to discriminate, period."
We thus neatly avoid the questions about whether a Jewish American would have to bake a cake honoring Hitler or whether a restaurant could deny service to Muslims based on the sincere religious belief that they were icky; no, the
only sort of discrimination that would be allowed is the one about the Sex Stuff, because there simply isn't any "religious belief" worth mentioning, much less specifically protecting, other than the Sex Stuff. After thousands of years we have effectively pared it down to the basics, and the basics are whether or not two women promising a lifelong commitment to one another is taking the moral sheen off your own alimony checks.
As for why it fell to Louisiana to draft up the simpler, stupider version of the bill, you can form your own conclusions. The Gulf Coast states are not known for their political subtlety. It's also worth mentioning that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal still harbors fantasies about a presidential run one of these days, perhaps after all the more plausible Republican candidates have died in baby-kissing photo-ops gone horribly awry, and in order to make a name for himself he has been experimenting with ever-bolder attempts to appeal to what he once called The Stupid Party.
So there's Louisiana's entry. Let's boil "religious freedom" down to only the part about gay marriage, because everybody knows that's the only religious freedom anyone gives the slightest damn about, and see where that goes.