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Arkansas Governor Asks Lawmakers to Recall Religious Freedom Bill - New York Times




Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas has said he will sign a religious freedom bill, but faces growing pressure from businesses like Walmart that oppose it. Danny Johnston/Associated Press

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Facing a backlash from businesses and gay rights advocates, Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas on Wednesday called on state lawmakers to either recall or amend legislation billed as a religious freedom measure so that it mirrored a federal law approved in 1993.


Mr. Hutchinson, a Republican, said he understood the divide in Arkansas and across the nation over the question of same-sex marriage and its impact on people’s religious beliefs. His own son, Seth, he said, had asked him to veto the bill, which critics say could allow individuals and businesses to discriminate against gay men and lesbians.


To ensure that the state is “a place of tolerance,” Mr. Hutchinson said, he was considering using an executive order that would seek to balance the “competing constitutional obligations” if the legislature declined to make changes to the bill.


“What is important from an Arkansas standpoint is one, we get the right balance,” he said, “and secondly, we make sure that we communicate we’re not going to be a state that fails to recognize the diversity of our workplace, our economy and our future.”


“This is a bill that in ordinary times would not be controversial,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “But these are not ordinary times.”


Two state legislative leaders — Senator Jonathan Dismang, president pro tem of the Senate, and Jeremy Gillam, speaker of the House — who appeared with Mr. Hutchinson at a news conference Wednesday, said they agreed that the bill should be changed, but that they could not guarantee that outcome.


The legislation, which easily cleared the state House by lopsided margins, has created a political rift in the state, with Mark Stodola, the mayor of Little Rock, sending a letter to Mr. Hutchinson this week urging him to veto the bill, saying it would have “a negative impact on our state’s image.”


Several businesses and tech companies, including the state’s largest employer, Walmart, as well as the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce, the Arkansas Municipal League and other civic groups have spoken out against the legislation.



‘Religious Freedom’ Laws Across the States





20 states have “religious freedom” laws. Indiana’s law, written more expansively than other states, has caused a national uproar. Critics say it could be used by businesses to deny services to gay and lesbian couples.




12 states introduced legislation this year. Despite opposition to Indiana’s law, Arkansas’s legislature passed a similar bill on Tuesday. Similar bills have stalled in Georgia and North Carolina.






20 states have “Religious Freedom” laws. Indiana’s law, written more expansively than other states, andcaused a national uproar. Critics say it could be used by businesses to deny services to gay and lesbian couples.




12 states introduced legislation this year. Despite opposition to Indiana’s law, Arkansas’s legislature passed a similar bill on Tuesday. Similar bills have stalled in Georgia and North Carolina.






Mr. Hutchinson’s announcement came a day after his counterpart in Indiana, Mike Pence, found himself in a tenuous political predicament as he sought to satisfy both the business interests that have threatened to punish the state for its new religious freedom law and local conservatives who fought for the measure and do not want to see it diluted.


In Indianapolis on Wednesday, lawmakers were weighing language they intend to add to the state’s law as part of what Mr. Pence has described as “a clarification” and also “a fix.” Precise wording was still being hashed out, officials said, but Mr. Pence has said that the intent will be to clarify that the state’s law does not give businesses the right to deny services to anyone, including gay men and lesbians


With the N.C.A.A. Final Four tournament in Indianapolis this weekend and mounting pressure from business leaders, Indiana lawmakers were racing to draft new language, then hurry the revised measure through both chambers of the state legislature for Mr. Pence’s signature before week’s end.


To expedite the process, aides said legislators were expected to use an unrelated, but almost-approved Senate bill as a vehicle for the new language. That would allow them to reach agreement on language during a committee meeting of selected lawmakers, then move the measure through both chambers immediately.


Still, Democrats, who hold the minority, have said they intend to push for a repeal, and it remained uncertain whether all Republicans would l support what some conservatives in the state view as a watered-down measure.


The bill in Arkansas is similar to the Indiana law, but both diverge in certain respects from the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That act was passed in 1993 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, Arkansas’s most famous political son.


But the political context has changed widely since. The federal law was spurred by an effort to protect Native Americans in danger of losing their jobs because of religious ceremonies that involved an illegal drug, peyote. Now the backdrop is often perceived to be the cultural division over same-sex marriages.


Both states’ laws allow for larger corporations, if they are substantially owned by members with strong religious convictions, to claim that a ruling or mandate violates their religious faith, something reserved for individuals or family businesses in other versions of the law. Both allow religious parties to go to court to head off a “likely” state action that they fear will impinge on their beliefs, even if it has not yet happened.


The Arkansas act contains another difference in wording, several legal experts said, that could make it harder for the government to override a claim of religious exemption. The state, according to the Arkansas bill, must show that a law or requirement that someone is challenging is “essential” to the furtherance of a compelling governmental interest, a word that is absent from the federal law and those in other states, including Indiana.


“It has way too broad an application,” said John DiPippa, a law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, who had spoken before the legislature in 2011 on behalf of a narrower and ultimately unsuccessful version of the bill. “I never anticipated or supported applying it to for-profit companies and certainly never anticipated it applying to actions outside of government.”


The future of similar measures elsewhere remained unclear. In Georgia, where the legislature will adjourn for the year on Thursday, opponents of a pending proposal rallied Tuesday outside the State Capitol. Although the bill’s path has been turbulent — a Monday committee hearing about the measure was canceled — supporters and critics alike said it could be approved in the session’s final hours. North Carolina is far earlier in its debate. Religious freedom proposals surfaced last week in both the House and the Senate, and neither has faced a vote at even the committee level.



Campbell Robertson reported from Little Rock, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Erik Eckholm contributed reporting from New York, and Monica Davey from Chicago.











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