A conservative representative killed an anti-LGBT law in Missouri. Here's why.
“I’m not God. I am not God. But I am a Christian. And I put my faith in God and the Lord. I don’t put my faith in man.” These were the words spoken by Jim Hansen to justify his vote on Senate Joint Resolution 39, a religious freedom amendment that would severely hamper LGBT rights.
“I’m putting my faith and trust in God,” the Missouri Representative said, “He will be the judge.”
And with that, Hansen voted against SJR 39. And the amendment, which had been summarily passed in the Missouri Senate, was dead. Hansen’s was the deciding vote.
The failure of SJR 39 is especially uplifting in light of the many hurtful anti-gay laws recently passed in Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and other states. While legislators throughout the nation passed harmful laws, representatives in Missouri, among them devout conservatives, somehow got it right.Here’s how that happened.
SJR 39, penned by Senator Bob Onder, was a nasty bit of legislation. The amendment would have blocked the state from “from imposing a penalty on a religious organization who acts in accordance with a sincere religious belief concerning same sex marriage.” Those actions included “the refusal to perform a same sex marriage ceremony or allow a same sex wedding ceremony to be performed on the religious organization’s property,” and “provid[ing] goods of expressional or artistic creation for a same sex wedding ceremony.”
Opponents argued that the amendment’s vague, broad language essentially legalized discrimination against Missouri’s LGBT community. The Huffington Post explained in March:It means state-contracted counselors, for example, could deny services to people in same-sex marriages. Taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies could refuse to place children in their homes. State-funded homeless shelters could turn away people in a same-sex marriage. Government employees could refuse to file official forms for such people, a la Kim Davis, or decline to provide state tax benefits to them.
Missouri’s Senate Democrats were well aware of the implications of adding the amendment to the state’s constitution, and staged a 39-hour-long filibuster to try to block it. But the effort proved futile, and the amendment landed in the laps of the state’s House of Representatives.
Representative Mike Colona, the only openly gay member of the legislature, told me in a phone interview that the filibuster had a mixed effect on how the resolution was approached in the House. “What that did was put House Republican leadership on notice that they needed to handle this with velvet gloves,” he explained.