You have to give the Arizona legislature credit: They saw the way the tide of history was flowing, and they tried to run their state straight up on a sandbar. The legislature passed a bill cleverly named the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which set out to restore freedom by allowing businesses to refuse to serve anyone on religious grounds. Even Christians! (Let’s all stop for a laugh as we think about how it would go over in Arizona if a business refused to serve Christians.)  Of course, and undoubtedly, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was designed to discriminate against gay people, since in some places they can now get married and be accepted into society and other things that might be uncomfortable to legislators. (And not just in Arizona.) So they crafted a bill that disguised the anti-gay sentiment as a pro-freedom sentiment. This is, sadly, almost exactly the same way that people will still tell you the Civil War was not about slavery, but about states’ rights. Of course the main one of those rights just happened to be the ability to own slaves.  Here’s the good news: Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the bill! Here’s the bad news: She had to think about it for more than three nanoseconds first. It was not exactly, as my man Charlie Pierce says, a profile in courage.  Brewer might have, in the end, felt the bill was morally wrong. But what she unquestionably felt was pressure to veto the bill from a lot of powerful groups — especially the National Football League.  Arizona has hosted two Super Bowls, and of course it loves the money and attention that comes with the biggest event in American sports. On Tuesday, before Brewer’s veto, the NFL issued a statement about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act: “Our policies emphasize tolerance and inclusiveness, and prohibit discrimination based on age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or any other improper standard. We are following the issue in Arizona and will continue to do so should the bill be signed into law, but will decline further comment at this time.”  In other words: We’ll take our ball and go home.  That’s not an idle threat. The NFL has already spanked the state once for discrimination — it moved the Super Bowl from Tempe to the Rose Bowl in 1993 because Arizona the state hadn’t yet established a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. And this year’s Super Bowl in New York (OK, New Jersey) shows that the league is expanding its idea of what qualifies a city to host the Super Bowl. For years the league just rotated the game among warm-weather cities, and the Cardinals’ stadium in Glendale was one of the few that met Super Bowl requirements. But if the league is willing to play anywhere, there’s no need to play in a state that discriminates. This is called leverage. People tend to use that in politics.  Some people don’t like politics in their sports — or, I guess, sports in their politics. But there are some moments when sports acts as a clarifying agent. Muhammad Ali gave up his title rather than fight a war he opposed. Nelson Mandela reached out to a white rugby team and helped the healing in South Africa. These past few weeks in Sochi, gay athletes — merely by their existence at the Winter Olympics — showed the profound silliness of Russia’s anti-gay laws. (FYI, Arizona legislators: Vladimir Putin is not the leader you want to find yourself on the same side of.)  The NFL has its own issues to clean up. (Is there a state with the guts to refuse the Super Bowl until the NFL changes the name of the Redskins? Probably not.) But a young man named Michael Sam is about to land on an NFL roster somewhere. There have been other gay players in the past, and there are surely closeted ones on NFL teams now. The NFL is saying, in effect, that it won’t allow its employees to be discriminated against. That’s a simply American value. It’s also the way the tide is flowing, no matter how hard the Arizona legislature tried to bail.
Arizona's governor vetoed a bill that would have discriminated against gay people. One of the reasons? The NFL didn't like it.