Maar liefst 95 schrijvers uit Mississippi, waaronder John Grisham en Donna Tartt, spreken zich uit tegen de House Bill 1523, waarin de staat ingaat tegen de landelijke wetten tegen homodiscrminatie en de openstelling van het huwelijk voor gay paren. De House Bill 1523 beroept zich op de vrijheid om te geloven dat je anderen mag discrimineren en heet eufemistisch: ‘Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act.’

De wet gaat hiervan uit:

SECTION 2. The sincerely held religious beliefs or moral 16 convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that:

(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;

(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and

(c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.

Lees de hele wet hier.

Op de site Jackson Free Press nemen de 95 schrijvers stelling tegen deze wet.

Mississippi has a thousand histories, but these can be boiled down to two strains: our reactionary side, which has nourished intolerance and degradation and brutality, which has looked at difference as a threat, which has circled tightly around the familiar and the monolithic; and our humane side, which treasures compassion and charity and a wide net of kinship, which is fascinated by character and story, which is deeply involved in the daily business of our neighbors. This core kindness, the embracing of wildness and weirdness, is what has nurtured the great literature that has come from our state. What literature teaches us is empathy. It reminds us to reach out a hand to our neighbors—even if they look different from us, love different from us—and say, “Why, I recognize you; you’re a human, just like me, sprung from the same messy place, bound on the same hard road.” Mississippi authors have written through pain, and they have written out of disappointment, but they have also written from wonder, and pride, and a fierce desire to see the politics of this state live up to its citizens. It is deeply disturbing to so many of us to see the rhetoric of hate, thinly veiled, once more poison our political discourse. But Governor Phil Bryant and the Mississippi legislators who voted for this bill are not the sole voices of our state. There have always been people here battling injustice. That’s the version of Mississippi we believe in, and that’s the Mississippi we won’t stop fighting for.

Zie hier de lijst met alle namen.