State Sen. Josh McKoon of Columbus, our state’s self-anointed defender of the religious freedom to discriminate against gay people, voiced frustration the other day at the opposing role played by Delta Air Lines and other corporations.
“We’ve had this problem because very large multi-national corporations that are headquartered in this state – their executives, many of whom are not from Georgia, have different values than you and I do,” he told the Paulding County GOP. “They think that their cultural norms, their liberal, far-left cultural norms, should be applied to our state.”
I confess, I never would have thought of Delta Air Lines and other defenders of a diverse workforce as modern-day “outside agitators” out to impose their foreign values on the traditional South. And to his credit, McKoon at least had the decency to stop short of calling them communists, as his ideological forebears did to Martin Luther King Jr. and others, although with terms such as “liberal, far-left,” he certainly got the message across.
And while we tend to forget it now, it’s important to note that a half century ago, defenders of bigotry also sought to use religion as justification and as legal protection, just as McKoon does today. It didn’t work then, and shouldn’t now.
In 1967, when a judge ruled in Loving v. Virginia that a black woman and a white man had no right to get married, he did so by citing biblical verses that to his mind required that the races be kept separate and not allowed to mix. When Bob Jones Sr., founder of Bob Jones University in South Carolina, argued in 1960 in favor of segregation, the evangelical leader did so on the basis of a passionate religious faith:
“If you are against segregation and against racial separation, then you are against God Almighty….,” Jones thundered. “God is the author of segregation. God is the author of Jewish separation and Gentile separation and Japanese separation. God made of one blood all nations, but He also drew the boundary lines between races.”
Many of the so-called “seg academies” created in that era by white families fleeing newly desegregated public schools also claimed a religious justification, arguing that since God had created separate races, such separation “should be preserved in the fear of the Lord.”
In the end, the American people and judicial system did not find that argument convincing. By the 1970s, the federal government began to strip segregated institutions of their tax-exempt status on the grounds that agencies that practiced discrimination did not qualify as “charitable.” Bob Jones and others claimed religious liberty as protection, but the Supreme Court in 1983 disagreed.
“It would be wholly incompatible with the concepts underlying tax exemption to grant tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private educational entities,” the court ruled. “… The government’s fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on petitioners’ exercise of their religious beliefs.”
The logic in that ruling makes it clear where we are headed in this argument. It just may take some time to get there.
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