Once Invoked Nazis to Defend Anti-Gay Legislation
Texas is now all-but-certain to pass the “Save Chick-fil-A” bill which would deliver special religious protections to people and organizations so they can discriminate against LGBTQ people without fear of government reprisals.
In other words, it enables state-supported discrimination under the cloak of “religious freedom.” The legislation now needs just one more vote each in the House and Senate. The governor is expected to sign it.
While news of the bill, SB 1978, is slowly growing, news about the bill’s top sponsor in the House has been largely absent.
Texas Republican State Rep. Matt Krause, the “Save Chick-fil-A” bill’s author, was first elected in 2012. He is a graduate of San Diego Christian College and Liberty University School of Law, the same Liberty University run by Trump BFF Jerry Falwell Jr. Both are private evangelical Christian colleges.
Krause is among the most conservative lawmakers in the Texas House. And in 2013 Equality Texas named Krause Texas’ Most Homophobic Legislator.
In 2015, as the Supreme Court was gearing up to hand down its ruling that would recognize same-sex couples have the right to marry, Krause tried to pass a different “religious freedom” bill, essentially a “license to discriminate.” And to do so he “invoked the Nazis,” as HuffPost reported at the time, “to fend off criticism that the proposal could be used to facilitate discrimination.”
That bill would have built religious discrimination into the Texas state constitution.
In 2011, as an attorney for Liberty Counsel, an anti-gay hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Krause defended a Texas high school student who claimed his “religious beliefs” allow him to make anti-gay comments in class. “I said, ‘I’m Christian and, to me, being homosexual is wrong,'” the teen said, reportedly also with “No gays in Christianity.”
Krause called the teen’s hateful words “benign,” and said voicing his anti-gay beliefs was one of “the issues that were important to him.”
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