Readers React: Anti-LGBT laws will fail just like past efforts to discriminate

To the editor: The movement to legalize faith-based discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons recalls mid-20th century efforts to thwart racial integration. (“Mississippi law opens a new front in the battle over gay rights,” April 5)

Through the 1960s, die-hard segregationists proposed various anti-integration laws under the sanctified guise of property rights protection. By design, such laws served to keep blacks in segregated neighborhoods and schools. California was party to this sordid episode. In 1964, our state’s Proposition 14 — contrived to re-legalize racial discrimination by landlords and property owners — passed with 65% of the vote.

Three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court found Proposition 14 unconstitutional. The same fate awaits the shameful spate of anti-LGBT laws.

Edward Alston, Santa Maria

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To the editor: Recently enacted “religious freedom” laws allowing anti-LGBT discrimination reflect a parallel mid-20th century trend in which devout segregationists strove to legitimize racial segregation in the wake of court mandates. Those efforts were short-lived, but certain religious institutions embraced racial discrimination for decades.

Christian evangelicals’ flagship college, Bob Jones University, long interpreted the Bible to forbid its students to engage in interracial dating — for which the IRS revoked its tax-exempt status in 1976 — but abruptly dropped this discriminatory policy in 2000. The Mormon faith’s treatment of blacks as inferiors didn’t end until 1978, when a divine “revelation” voided its doctrine limiting the “priesthood” to whites.

So we’ve seen that religions can evolve beyond invidious discrimination. It just takes time for some to realize that the label of “religious freedom” doesn’t sanctify faith-based bigotry.

Greg Gilbert, Cool, Calif.

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