Actually, the bill is in response to incidents like the one in Oregon where a Christian bakery was found guilty of civil rights violations for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple.
Via National Review:
“Christians backing this bill are essentially arguing for homosexual Jim Crow laws.” So asserts Kirsten Powers in today’s USA Today. What could justify such an assertion? Nothing. Powers is wrong about the law.
The bill in question is a religious-liberty protection being debated in the Kansas legislature. The bill would protect all citizens from being forced by the government into recognizing or celebrating a same-sex marriage if it ran contrary to their religious beliefs. So how is a bill protecting liberty akin to Jim Crow?
Powers isn’t alone. Slate ran a piece with the headline “Kansas’s Anti-Gay Segregation Bill Is an Abomination.” But the Kansas bill and similar bills that protect liberty are about preventing the kind of coercion that happened under Jim Crow. They protect what should be already protected: basic civil liberties such as freedom of association, freedom of contract, and freedom of religion.
Jim Crow and segregation did the exact opposite. Those wicked regimes legally coerced people to keep them separated, to prevent them from associating or contracting. Yet today, we see liberals of various stripes saying the law should coerce people into associating and contracting.