Christian conservative Bryan Fischer
this week argued that singer Bryan Adams is racist for protesting a
Mississippi law that targets the LGBT community.
The law allows businesses to deny
services to LGBT people based on their “sincerely held religious
beliefs or moral convictions.”
Adams last week joined a growing list
of performers canceling shows in states with such laws.
“I cannot in good conscience perform
in a state where certain people are being denied their civil rights
due to their sexual orientation,” Adams wrote in announcing his
decision to cancel a show at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum in
Biloxi.
“Bryan Adams is now the leading bigot
in the South,” Fischer said in a column.
The law, according
to Fischer, “protects the conscience and liberty rights of
blacks (and whites) who serve as pastors, county clerks, heads of
non-profits and adoption agencies, and who operate businesses as
wedding vendors. Their right to freely exercise their religious
convictions is what HB 1523 is all about.”
“It does not foster discrimination,
it prevents it. … Anybody and everybody who is against invidious
discrimination ought to love this law.”
“But Adams is having none of it. He
is evidently happy to drag Mississippi blacks back to the civil
rights Stone Age of the 1960s in which their religious principles and
rights of conscience had no legal protection, an era in which black
pastors could be thrown in jail for standing for principles of
liberty and equality,” Fischer added.