In the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the ongoing celebrations at SMU this week, many of us are taking the time to reflect on how the American Civil Rights Movement and the continuing struggle for racial equality in the United States closely mirror the ever-present fight for acceptance and full legal equality that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are still battling in America’s court houses, its homes, and its schools. The civil rights movement is far from over. For many, it has just begun.

While the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community has made great strides in the fight for marriage equality in certain states, others have opted to turn the clock back to the dark ages, erasing years of advancements in human rights.

Tennessee bill HB 1153, introduced last year, is an example of such efforts and would effectively enable bullies to harass other students based on their perceived sexual orientation. Similar to another bill proposed in Michigan, the fact that such legislation exists without being immediately struck down is a complete embarrassment.

What is more disturbing is the fact that this bill is promoted by the Family Action Council (FAC) of Tennessee, a conservative Christian organization formed in an effort to preserve the old-fashioned protestant morals that they’d like to think put this country on the map. What Jesus would say about all of this, I haven’t the faintest, although even the shallowest reading of the Bible might indicate his utter disapproval.

Originally designed to protect LGBT students, FAC President David Fowler has stated that the “license to bully” bill was created with the purpose of stopping bullying. In order to do so, Fowler proposes that laws protecting LGBT students actually raise them up above their hetero-normative peers, making them seem more important. The Tennessee bill would reverse this trend, instead protecting the Christian students who would otherwise be legally forced to hide their religious beliefs.

But if your religious beliefs lead you to make fun of another child to the point that that student decides to put a gun to their head and end it all, perhaps your religious beliefs are not deserving of legal protection. And in the end, this is exactly what HB 1153 will serve to protect. Bullies will be able to humiliate their peers (be they gay or not) with verbal assaults and then hide behind their religious beliefs as if they somehow entitled them to go out of their way to tease, ridicule, and harass.

Today, we would never allow a child to mock another student because his skin was black, especially under the pretext that their religious beliefs obligated them to do so. We look at the civil rights movement and we think, “how could people tolerate such open acts of aggression, hatred, and discrimination?”

Yet this is the dilemma we face today. Instead of creating separate but equal bathrooms, we create separate but equal marriage. Instead of quoting scripture to defend Jim Crow, we quote it to defend anti-gay hate speech. Rather than saying, “you’re black, you can’t go to this school,” we say, “you’re gay, you can’t adopt this child.” At some point, we decided that conservative Christian morals were not an excuse to discriminate based on race. How long will it take before we realize the same is true of discrimination based on sexual orientation?

Spencer is a senior majoring in accounting and Spanish.