If you're an evangelical voter, or gay, or concerned with the state's business climate, watch where Ted Cruz ends up in Georgia's portion of the Republican presidential primary on Tuesday.
Whether the Texas senator finishes a strong second or weak third could have an impact on the Legislature’s coming debate on a “religious liberty” bill.
The connection is not absolute, but it is one of many tea leaves that have become required reading in the last few days in the attempt to keep up with this session’s most volatile issue – which has gone underground and isn’t likely to surface again for a solid two weeks.
On Thursday, Ralph Reed introduced Gov. Nathan Deal at a luncheon gathering of his Faith and Freedom Coalition on the state Capitol campus. Reed issued the governor a not-so-subtle invitation to weigh in on HB 757, the “religious liberty” bill now roiling the waters. Reed’s group is strongly in favor of it.
“Governor, if it’s consistent with your principles and your values, we would love to join you at a signing ceremony for religious freedom after this session,” Reed said.
Deal spoke for the next 30 minutes, and never once mentioned the topic that has most transfixed his audience for the last three years.
The Faith and Freedom crowd might have learned more – though not much — at a press conference called days earlier by the governor to celebrate the growth of the film industry in Georgia.
“We’re working with the leadership of the General Assembly now as that bill is continuing to move through the process,” Deal said. “So we’ll see.”
The governor’s intentionally bland comments came on the first working day after the Senate had altered HB 757, a rather innocuous measure reaffirming the clergy’s right to preside over whatever marriages they choose. Same-sex or not.
To this bill, senators added the First Amendment Defense Act, authored by Greg Kirk, R-Americus, which originally gave cover to religious individuals and institutions who believe interaction with a same-sex couple amounts to approval – and thus would be a violation of their faith.
To dampen worries that this would encourage discrimination, Kirk’s legislation, as it was added to HB 757, was altered to permit anyone to shun anyone on the basis of any marital status whatsoever. Or lack of marital status. If the shunning is rooted in sincerely held religious beliefs. Confused?
Joe Whitley, a former federal prosecutor hired by Georgia Equality to provide a legal analysis of the hybrid legislation, wrote that as now configured, the bill could give a restaurant cover to refuse service to an interracial couple, allow a sales clerk to refuse to wait on a single mother, or give a business grounds to fire a single woman living with her opposite-sex partner.
Never mind the same-sex stuff.
This was the situation on Monday when Governor Deal issued what might have seemed like, at first, an oatmeal reaction. But “we’ll see” actually contained several important meanings.
“Don’t panic” was one – a message directed to a business community that fears an economic boycott in the style of the one that hit Indiana last year after passage of a “religious liberty” measure. Gubernatorial engagement also takes some of the heat off House Speaker David Ralston, and is a signal that whatever measure that’s passed will be intended to survive judicial scrutiny.
But another message that lurked between the lines was that something will pass the Legislature this election year – so the business and LGBT communities should start thinking about what they would be willing to live with.
One possible solution would be to restrict protections now offered by HB 757 to non-profit, religious-oriented corporations.
But the most important message Deal delivered wasn’t in his words. It was in the occasion – that ceremony noting the growing importance of TV and movie production in Georgia.
Last month, in the first days of the session, Deal laid out his priorities before the Georgia Chamber. One of the most important he named was protection of film industry tax credits that, the governor said, had brought more than 79,000 jobs, and roughly $4 billion in wages to Georgia in the last seven years.
This is good news, of course. But like the convention business that drives Atlanta, film-making is a portable industry driven by executives who can easily take their business elsewhere. One of the prices for those tax credits: Movies must carry a brief note in the credits, declaring that the film was made in Georgia.
If that made-in-Georgia trademark becomes a liability, then the movie game is up in this state.
Hence the low-profile given to HB 757, since it sailed out of the Senate and returned to the House. Don’t look for it to raise its head until after March 11. That’s the deadline for candidate qualification – the day when lawmakers will know whether they have primary opponents or not.
Which brings us back to Ted Cruz and Tuesday’s presidential primary. The GOP activists who have pushed “religious liberty” legislation in the Capitol these last three years have nearly all lined up behind the Texas senator.
“There’s definitely some overlap,” conceded state Sen. Josh McKoon, R-Columbus, who has been a central actor in the push.
A third-place finish for Cruz, in a state that he was expected to dominate only a few months ago, could be taken as yet another sign of the waning clout of religious conservatives in Georgia. Which might stiffen resistance to HB 757.
McKoon disagrees with this assessment. It isn’t unusual for two people to look into the bottom of the same tea cup and see different things. But then the Columbus state senator offered what might also be interpreted as describing a political faction under siege, if not in decline.
“Obviously, if Ted Cruz becomes the nominee of the party, I think [religious liberty], along with a menu of other issues, gets front and center in a way they have not been in the past,” McKoon said.
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