Law SB200 allows banishment of Holy Bible

A lawmaker in Colorado who challenged the authors of SB200, a new law that bans discrimination based on the "perception" of gender, contends it was written to give a wide open door to anyone who wants to banish Christian beliefs or the Bible. "This is so loaded. It's written in an open-ended fashion that anybody can take just about any part of it and grow it into a huge monstrosity," state Rep. Kevin Lundberg said. "Section 8 of Senate Bill 200 is a wide open door for any judge to censor anything that condemns homosexuality, including Scripture," Lundberg said at the news conference. Section 8 is headlined, "Publishing of discriminative matter forbidden." "I do believe that the Bible is banned, under the plain language of this new statute," said Steve Crampton, general counsel of Liberty Counsel. Lundberg said the statute includes some "very troubling" provisions "that can be used in fairly heavy-handed ways. It goes so far and it goes so broad … the more I read it the more troubled I get." He said Section 8, for example, regarding the publication of discriminatory material.

""When it was on the floor of the house and we were debating it I discounted the overall effect, thinking it applied to the posting of rules for hotels and lodging," he said. "When I more seriously looked at all the particulars, then it starts to encompass a prohibition on anything of a printed nature that's distributed or sold or shared for virtually any purpose." Lundberg said it's clear the Bible could be targeted by those using the vague definitions in the law. "If you're going to be distributing Scriptures, there are clear passages that someone of a homosexual orientation could easily find offensive," he said. He said not only did Colorado lawmakers create an open-ended document, "any court could take it to whatever direction they wanted to take it, and they would have the authority of the statute to fall back onto."