| Tennessee Republican State Rep. Glen Casada told a Nashville television station he introduced legislation preventing local governments from requiring their contractors to abide by local human rights ordinances because such ordinances dictate moral policy. Gov. Bill Haslam signed Casada’s bill into law this week.
Gay groups and legal activists have already started working on a legal challenge to a new state law in Tennessee, which was signed into law Monday, May 23, by Republican Gov. Bill Haslam. The law which prevents local governments from requiring their contractors to abide by local human rights ordinances. It’s a law that stipulates it’s now OK in Nashville discriminate against gay people on the grounds of their sexuality. It has in effect legalised hate of hates.
The legislation, called “Equal Access to Intrastate Commerce Act,” was purely aimed at undermining a new Nashville metro area ordinance, signed into law in April. The ordinance prohibited city contractors from discriminating based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Abby Rubenfeld, a Nashville attorney and a former legal director of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, said Tuesday, May 24, that the new state law will “definitely be challenged — we are working on it right now.”
Haslam, who took office Jan. 15, pitched his support for the law as a pro-business act, saying it relieved businesses of the necessity of navigating differing non-discrimination regulations from city to city. Backers, the Family Action Council of Tennessee argued that it does not target LGBT people.
Greg Nevins of Lambda Legal’s Atlanta office said Lambda is not involved in mounting a legal challenge against the Tennessee law, but he called it “a terrible piece of legislation.”
The Human Rights Campaign said Haslam was trying to score “cheap political points” by giving a “green light” to anti-LGBT discrimination. HRC noted that a number of large corporations — including FedEx, AT&T, Comcast and the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce, who previously backed the bill, supported Haslam where now changing their stance and don’t like the law.
Specifically, this bill prohibits local ordinances from having non-discrimination laws broader than that of the state. According to Lambda Legal, Tennessee has no state-wide laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in either public or private employment.
Tennessee is fast becoming known as the ‘hate state’ after another anti-gay bill — sought to prohibit teachers from providing any information about homosexuality to public school students in grades K through 8 — passed the Tennessee Senate 19-to-11 on May 20 but did not get a vote in the House before the General Assembly adjourned May 21. The “Don’t Say Gay Bill” — was amended to limit sex education curricula “to natural reproduction science.” The Tennessee Equality Project said the bill “remains a threat to safe schools for all students in Tennessee,” even though the bill no longer references homosexuality specifically.
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