A Brief History of Mississippi Homophobia

Mississippi made headlines this year with the enactment of its Protecting Freedom of Conscience From Government Discrimination Act, one of the broadest anti-LGBT "religious liberty" laws in the nation. The act states that the government cannot penalize an individual, organization, or business for acting according to the following "sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions": that "marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman"; that "sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage"; and that "male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth." But Mississippi's homophobia and transphobia didn't spring up just in 2016, or even in 2014, when it passed what's often called the first true "license to discriminate" law in the nation. Click through to see a brief history of anti-LGBT sentiment in the land of the Delta blues.