Vermont joined the city of Boston this week in issuing an official ban on state travel to North Carolina in protest of that state’s anti-LGBT discrimination legislation passed last week. Yesterday, Vermont followed up this action by adding a second official travel ban, this time to Mississippi after that state’s anti-LGBT laws passed this week.
“Mississippi’s governor signed far-reaching legislation allowing individuals and institutions with religious objections to deny services to gay couples,” reported an April 5 New York Times article. “The measure signed by Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi allows churches, religious charities and privately held businesses to decline services to people if doing so would violate their religious beliefs on marriage and gender.”
Meanwhile, the North Carolina law “strips municipalities of their ability to enact stronger anti-discrimination laws,” said Boston City Councilor Josh Zakim, who filed the travel ban ordinance last week. Boston’s city council voted unanimously in favor of the bill the next day. This sweeping legislation of North Carolina’s was attached to a more specifically discriminatory bill that banned transgender people access to public restrooms that do not “match their so-called “birth gender,” Zakim noted.
Back in Mississippi, businesses immediately began responding by planning to pull away from the state: for example, PayPal cancelled a $3.6 million investment in North Carolina. This move inspired Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin to invite PayPal to bring the 400 jobs that investment would have given Mississippi to Vermont instead.
According to a recent Human Rights Campaign statement:
Mississippi’s HB 1523 is the third stand-alone anti-LGBT bill signed in law in 2016. The attack on fairness and equality are part of an onslaught of anti-LGBT bills being pushed in 2016 by anti-equality activists around the country, including nearly 200 anti-LGBT bills in 34 states. As of today, at least half of these bills have been beaten back around the country.
Check back here at the Boston Spirit website to follow this story as it unfolds across the country.
