Mississippi law on LGBT rights faces challenge

JACKSON, Miss. — Advocates of same-sex marriage are asking the

U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a new Mississippi law that lets government workers and business people cite their own religious objections to refuse services to LGBT people.

An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was filed within hours of when the law took effect Tuesday. Legal experts say it’s the broadest religious-objections law enacted by any state since the nation’s high court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.

The law was championed and signed by Republican Gov. Phil Bryant in 2016, but the law had been on hold amid federal court challenges. It protects three beliefs: that marriage is only between a man and a woman, sex should only take place in such a marriage, and a person’s gender is determined at birth and cannot be altered.

In an appeal Tuesday to the Supreme Court, attorneys for some of the gay and straight Mississippi residents who sued the state wrote that the law “is a transparent attempt to undermine the equal dignity of LGBT citizens established in this court’s decisions,” starting with a 2003 decision that struck down a Texas law against sodomy and continuing to the 2015 decision that effectively legalized same-sex marriage.

“It is an equally transparent attempt to endorse particular religious beliefs as state policy,” wrote the attorneys from the national gay-rights group Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund and the Mississippi Center for Justice.