A contentious battle between supporters of religious freedom and people in favor of gay rights in Indiana reached a turning point on Thursday, when Governor Mike Pence signed Senate Bill 101 -- a measure that both the state House and Senate had passed earlier in the week -- into law after stating: “The legislation is about respecting and reassuring Hoosiers that their religious freedoms are intact.”
However, blogger Arthur Chu wrote an article the same day for the liberal Daily Beast website on this topic with the title “Gay Money Is No Good in Indiana” under the subhead “Bigots Vs. Business.”
According to an article written by Tony Cook on the IndyStar website, the new law “prohibits state or local governments from substantially burdening a person's ability to exercise religion -- unless the government can show that it has a compelling interest and that the action is the least-restrictive means of achieving it.”
Although the bill does not mention sexual orientation, opponents fear that it could allow business owners to deny services to homosexuals for religious reasons, Cook noted. The legislation will take effect on July 1.
But Chu began his post by claiming:
Indiana’s businesses are now free to discriminate against gays, and [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender] allies are threatening to leave. The first to walk? Gamers, who may take their $50 million convention elsewhere.
GenCon, the world’s biggest convention for tabletop gaming and a massive moneymaking machine for the state of Indiana, … is threatening to leave … because it makes business sense.
The event “is only in Indianapolis in the first place because of the longstanding tradition" of GenCon being held in the Midwest, he stated. The gaming gathering “came to the Indiana Convention Center because there wasn’t room anywhere in Milwaukee.”
“It’s been brought up many times that it would make a lot of sense for GenCon to move to Seattle, where GenCon LLC is actually headquartered, as are Wizards of the Coast, the current makers of Dungeons and Dragons, which already hosts the even more massive Penny Arcade Expo,” the blogger stated.
“What might finally tip the scales in favor of breaking with tradition and abandoning flyover country for the coast?” Cruz asked. “Telling conventiongoers, exhibitors and VIP guests that their sexual orientation might get them refused service by local merchants.”
He then stated that “the Indianapolis travel bureau has spoken out against” the law since it is, bluntly, an anti-business bill.”
Quoting libertarians who say the “free market should inevitably lead to the end of Jim Crow, the end of the gender pay gap and ultimately achieve Martin Luther King’s dream without any need for protests or regulation from anyone,” Cruz responded: “In real life, it’s not that simple.”
He then stated that things “stay static for a long time” because of “humans' irrational fear of change,” even though “every 'economic impact' analysis of every same-sex referendum has stated that the impact of a 'wedding boom' and increased migration to a state seen as 'LGBT-friendly' can only have positive effects."
“But so what?” Cruz asked. “Indiana’s legislature has made it pretty clear that for them, 'values' trump economics to the point of turning away paying customers en masse if they have the wrong sexuality, to the point of driving business out of their state.”
The blogger then stated: “The capitalist view of the world is, if anything, kind of charmingly naive” since we have “no problem paying an immense price to turn away potential customers who want to trade with us because we’re prejudiced against them.”
“There’s little you can say to the potentially angry demographic of gatekeepers who value the 'purity' of their community -- whatever scale of community it might be, from a nation to a city to a media subculture -- over something as pissant as profit,” he noted.
Cruz then stated:
But you can say to the greedy businessmen and corporations that these people are not your allies, and that those hectoring censorious pro-diversity progressives actually are.
We are the ones who ultimately want to expand your audience -- the set of people who will buy your stuff -- as large as it can possibly be.
“The reactionaries are the ones who want to limit or shrink it,” he concluded. “Whose side are you going to be on?”
Before the law was approved, Cook noted, “Pence and leaders of the Republican-controlled General Assembly called those concerns a 'misunderstanding.'”
"This bill is not about discrimination," the governor said, "and if I thought it legalized discrimination, I would have vetoed it."
“The bill signing makes Indiana the 20th state in the nation to adopt such legislation,” Cook added. “It is modeled on the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” which became law in 1993.
