Dear Arizona,
Congratulations. You are now the first state actually to pass a bill
permitting businesses–even those open to the public–to refuse to provide
service to LGBT people based on an individual’s “sincerely held
religious belief.” This “turn away the gay” bill enshrines
discrimination into the law. Your taxi drivers can refuse to carry us.
Your hotels can refuse to house us. And your restaurants can refuse to
serve us.
Kansas tried to pass a similar law, but had the good sense to not let it
come up for a vote. The quashing came only after the Kansas Chamber of
Commerce and other traditional conservative groups came out strongly
against the bill.
But not you, Arizona. You’re willing to ostracize and marginalize LGBT
people to score political points with the extreme right of the
Republican Party. You say this bill protects “religious freedom,” but no
one is fooled. When I was younger, people used “God’s Will” as a reason
to keep the races separate, too. Make no mistake, this is the new
segregation, yours is a Jim Crow law, and you are about to make yourself
ground zero.
This bill also saddens me deeply. Brad and I have strong ties to
Arizona. Brad was born in Phoenix, and we vacation in Show Low. We have
close friends and relatives in the state and spend weeks there annually.
We even attended the Fourth of July Parade in Show Low in 2012, looking
like a pair of Arizona ranchers.
The law is breathtaking in its scope. It gives bigotry against us gays
and lesbians a powerful and unprecedented weapon. But your mean-spirited
representatives and senators know this. They also know that it is going
to be struck down eventually by the courts. But they passed it anyway,
just to make their hateful opinion of us crystal clear.
So let me make mine just as clear. If your Governor Jan Brewer signs
this repugnant bill into law, make no mistake. We will not come. We will
not spend. And we will urge everyone we know–from large corporations to
small families on vacation–to boycott. Because you don’t deserve our
dollars. Not one red cent.
And maybe you just never learn. In 1989, you voted down recognition of
the Martin Luther King holiday, and as a result, conventions and
tourists boycotted the state, and the NFL moved the Superbowl to
Pasadena. That was a $500 million mistake.
So if our appeals to equality, fairness, and our basic right to live in a
civil society without doors being slammed in our face for being who we
are don’t move you, I’ll bet a big hit to your pocketbook and state
coffers will.
George Takei
The original post can be found here
