Indiana News Roundup

Indiana elected officials announced yesterday that they agreed on new language to modify the recently enacted law that invites discrimination against LGBT people and others in the state.

“The proposal is far less than this situation requires,” said Lambda Legal Law and Policy Project Director Jennifer Pizer to Time.

Lawmakers now need to "complete the fix by actually providing those basic protections that LGBT people need to be equal and safe," she said.

Lambda Legal Midwest Regional Director Jim Bennett told Time that the original bill was brewing since Lambda Legal won its Indiana marriage equality case in October.

“We’ve all been able to stay close together throughout this fight going back to the beginning,” he said.

More from Time:

In some ways, fighting for marriage equality is an easier task for gay rights supporters than fighting for LGBT non-discrimination bills. Part of it is Americans’ widespread belief that those protections are already in place and confusion about what legal options LGBT people have if they’re fired from a job for being gay or transgender, while it has always been obvious and indisputable where same-sex marriage was not legal and what that meant. A lack of marriage rights is a straightforward issue, while discrimination isn’t always easy for outsiders to see, says Jenny Pizer of Lambda Legal.

“Non-discrimination is proactive and not reactive,” Pizer says. “That is a different kind of social change process.”

Pizer told ABC Radio News, "If there is a nondiscrimination law [already on the books], that law should be enforceable and enforced notwithstanding any religious claim.”

[Lambda Legal] has found that nondiscrimination laws typically trump RFRA laws in court.

But Indiana has no statewide law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, and only a handful of its counties have nondiscrimination laws at the local level. According to Pizer, that means there’s no protection from discrimination by companies — where in some other states, there is.

Learn more about Indiana's religious refusal law here and here.

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Lambda Legal is grateful to the Anita May Rosenstein Foundation for partially funding the work of the Law and Policy Project.