Fox News contributor Erick Erickson asked his supporters to lobby for discriminatory, anti-gay “Religious Freedom Restoration Acts” that a Fox colleague denounced as “homosexual Jim Crow Laws,” reports Media Matters for America.
In a February 12 email to “Erick’s Conservative Activist List” titled “The Facts” and a February 13 blog post on RedState.com, Erickson asked his supporters to petition for the expansion of so-called state “Religious Freedom Restoration Acts” (RFRAs) – laws that would give individuals and businesses a broad license to discriminate against LGBT people on religious grounds:
An absolute majority of American support religious exceptions relating to providing goods and services to gay marriage. But gay rights advocates oppose that. The Supreme Court will undoubtedly impose gay marriage on the nation by June. Our state legislature needs to pass RFRA now to protect people of faith.
[…]
Call your state legislators and demand religious freedom protections for conscientious objectors to the culture wars.
Erickson supported his call for RFRAs by citing a number of anti-gay horror stories popularized by Fox News – all cases where a business violated state non-discrimination laws by refusing to serve gay customers.
Religious liberty scholars, southern faith leaders, and some conservative lawmakers and business owners have all publicly denounced RFRAs over concerns that they would create a blank check for anti-gay discrimination.
Even Erickson’s colleagues at Fox have noted how extreme and discriminatory these kinds of RFRAs would be. Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers strongly condemned a RFRA bill in Kansas last year, taking issue with those who support the “homosexual Jim Crow Laws” that justify anti-LGBT bigotry in the name of Christianity. Even Megyn Kelly, a consistent enabler of homophobia at Fox, labeled Arizona’s controversial license-to-discriminate bill as “potentially dangerous“- a position she later abandoned.
Erickson has a history of cozying up with the anti-LGBT organizations pushing for these discriminatory RFRA bills, including the extremist Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a group CNN found to be behind the “genetic code” of the RFRA bills popping up across the country. ADF’s previous work on license-to-discriminate legislation so inspired Erickson that he begged readers of his RedState.com blog to donate money to the group.
