Let the debate officially begin.
State Senator Josh McKoon dropped his highly anticipated ‘Religious Freedom’ Bill on Wednesday, following in the footsteps of State Rep. Sam Teasley’s HB 218, which was filed in January. SB 129, the “Georgia Religious Freedom Restoration Act”, has the stated goal of protecting Georgia residents from government overreach on issues of personal faith. In theory, it merely reinforces the Federal Law passed by the U.S. Congress in 1993 called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. When in 1997 the Supreme Court severely weakened the RFRA by ruling that it could not be applied to state or local government, a host of states, (31 to be exact) began to roll out their own versions of the bill to protect their residents.
The debate here in Georgia, which in 2014 prevented the issue from gaining much traction in either the State House or Senate, is centered around the notion that the bill may provide an opportunity for business owners to discriminate against LGBT customers based on the issue of religion. Already opponents have begun picking the language of SB 129 apart, looking for wording that would provide credence to that fear.
Will a year of gathering allies and assuaging fears allow McKoon’s bill to pass through the Senate? Or will Atlanta’s business giants once again rise up against a bill that in 2014 they claimed would do serious damage to the state’s reputation and business climate?
We’ll find out soon enough.
Tubing Laws Relaxed
Hitting the beach is fun, sitting by the pool is great, but for my money there’s no greater summertime afternoon activity than floating down the river on a tube. I’d go so far as to put it in the top echelon of Georgia’s summer pastimes alongside Braves games, sunburns, and pining for college football. The Georgia legislature is no stranger to the joy that is shooting the ‘Hooch, (tubing down the Chattahoochee for the uninitiated) so it should be no surprise that it unanimously passed HB 172, which exempts inner tubes, rafts, or ‘homemade structures’, (somewhere Huck Finn is cracking open a beer) from the BUI law passed in 2013.
Now I’m not endorsing people over-serving themselves while out on the river, but the crime of drinking 6 beers while sitting atop an inflated piece of plastic moving at the pace of a lazy river’s current certainly doesn’t deserve the same penalty as driving a ski boat on Lake Lanier after a full day’s worth of 4th of July ‘celebrating’. Kudos to the House for relaxing regulations on an activity that frankly doesn’t need them.
Expect the bill to pass through the Senate by a similarly wide margin.
