The year is 2017 and with a single bill in South Dakota a new Jim Crow has been born.  The governor has signed a bill that legalizes the discrimination against LGBT citizens.  This bill allows adoption agencies to deny LGBT people the chance to adopt and become parents.  The basis of this bill is to protect religious beliefs that carry phobias against couples who are looking to be parents.  America has seen this type of discrimination before but it is shocking that after the Civil Rights Movement, the different waves of feminism, and recently the legalization of gay marriage that bills like Senate Bill 149 are still being passed.

The argument that this bill protects the religious freedoms of citizens is the same excuse that the Klu Klux Klan gave for burning crosses in law abiding African American yards and churches.  Situations like these beg the question of where does the religious citizens rights end and where the LGBT citizens begin.  The rights of LGBT people are physical things that are being taken away.  Whether or not a gay couple can adopt or take in a foster child is not impeding on someone else’s right to worship.  

How can a state make it legal for an agency to deny a person the right to pursue happiness of being a parent and say that it is protecting rights?  LGBT organizations are not campaigning to restrict religious people’s parental opportunities away due to the amount of hatred that certain religious groups present to LGBT communities.  If two happily married men or two women are financially, emotionally, and physically equipped to care for a child then the government should not allow them to be denied the right to be a parent because of their sexual orientation.  

South Dakota is not the only state to have anti-LGBT legislation; states like Michigan and North Carolina have also passed similar laws.  One would have thought that in today’s society that states would be passing anti-discrimination laws against LGBT people not the opposite.  This is just the first bill passed in 2017 and maybe it will be the last or it could be the catalyst that starts the revised version of Jim Crow Laws.  Of course it would not be appropriate to name them Jim Crow, so what should the history books call them?