Winning DOMA Attorney Files Federal Lawsuit Against Mississippi for Anti-Gay ‘Religious Freedom’ Law

Roberta Kaplan, Who Won Marriage and Recently Adoption for Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi Now Is Going After a Portion of HB 1523

Roberta Kaplan is the attorney who won Edie Windsor’s U.S. Supreme Court DOMA case in 2013. She also won marriage for same-sex couples in Mississippi, and very recently, won equal adoption rights for same-sex couples in the Magnolia State as well. Now, she’s turning her attention to Gov. Phil Bryant’s anti-gay “religious freedom” law, HB 1523, that outraged many across the nation.

The sweeping law allows anyone to claim a sincerely held religious beliefs to refuse service to same-sex couples, LGBT people, unwed mothers – literally anyone who has ever had sex outside of a monogamous one-man, one-woman “traditional” marriage.

Kaplan today filed a federal lawsuit against HB 1523 challenging the recusal provision of the law, which allows state officials to refuse to perform weddings for or even issues marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

“While HB 1523 states that ‘the authorization and licensing of any legally valid marriage [shall] not [be] impeded or delayed as a result of any recusal,’” the motion states, according to Buzzfeed’s Chris Geidner, “it leaves the manner of doing so completely up to the person who ‘recused’ him or herself, and provides no enforcement mechanism for making sure that there is no delay or impediment.” 

The legal motion is here.

“The statute that the State of Mississippi just enacted – HB 1523 – clearly violates the fundamental principle of equality before the law,” Kaplan says in a statement from the Campaign for Southern Equality, which is officially suing the State of Mississippi. “It authorizes, even encourages, discrimination against LGBT people in Mississippi re-creating, only months after the Supreme Court clearly held it unconstitutional, another form of second-class citizenship for LGBT Mississippians. State officials cannot  circumvent federal court injunctions and evade the Constitution by passing laws that seek to stigmatize LGBT people and segregate them from everyone else.”

Kaplan is again representing the same couples who challenged Mississippi’s same-sex marriage ban, and won. She is also co-author of Then Comes Marriage: United States V. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA.

Yesterday, the ACLU filed a separate federal lawsuit against HB 1523, challenging the entire law.

 

Image: Screenshot via The New School/YouTube