Lousiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins yesterday that the corporations that oppose his recent anti-LGBT executive action “are making a big mistake” by abandoning their “traditional alliance” with social conservatives and “teaming up with the left’s radical social agenda” on LGBT rights.
After a Louisiana House committee voted down a proposed “religious liberty” bill that would have given for-profit corporations the right to discriminate against same-sex couples, Lousiana Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an executive order yesterday protecting such discrimination. As has been the case in similar fights around the country, some of the staunchest opponents of Louisiana’s “religious liberty” bill were corporations that feared it would hurt their ability to recruit employees.
In an interview with Perkins on his “Washington Watch” program, Jindal said that Republican presidential candidates need to make promoting the freedom to discriminate a priority “because the left has made their assault on religious liberty a priority” and if they succeed, America is “going to lose the freedoms that are so fundamental,” including the freedom of speech and of association.
Jindal told Perkins that Republicans should avoid being “the party of big business,” but at the same time told pro-LGBT corporations that Republicans would do their bidding on issues such as environmental regulations and labor laws.
“One of the things, Tony, we’ve got to be on guard against, sometimes big business has allied itself with the radical left — you saw it in Indiana, you saw it in Arkansas, you saw a little bit of it here in Louisiana — against religious liberty,” he said. “They’re making a big mistake. The radical left, they want to tax and regulate businesses out of existence, they’re not for profit. So these businesses need to be careful. Economic liberty is the other side of the coin of religious liberty, two sides of the same coin.”
Perkins agreed, saying, “the left is not going to help them when it comes to the environmental blockades when they try to expand, or the labor laws and issues that they deal with. In many ways, I see big business, by teaming up with the left’s radical social agenda, they’re cutting the path of expansion and prosperity out from underneath themselves.”
“Absolutely, it’s very short-sighted, these politically correct, these short-term alliances,” Jindal responded. “And then you wake up. Because you’re exactly right, the same radical left that doesn’t want Keystone, doesn’t want to lower the corporate tax rates, the same radical left that wants the EPA to strangle our economy, that also wants to pursue radical environmental agendas that will make energy more expensive, more scarce at home, this is the same left that corporate America has gotten into bed with.
“It’s an unholy, unnatural alliance, is what I’ve argued. They should remember they need to go back to fighting for liberty and freedom and understand that the two of them always go together. And that has been the traditional alliance, and I think that’s what we need to get back to.”
Earlier in the interview, Jindal claimed that LGBT rights proponents are at war with religion, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution:
One of the greatest threats to our freedom is the area of religious liberty. The left clearly wants to erode the right to religious liberty guaranteed in the First Amendment, and that’s the basis of our freedom of speech and freedom of association rights. The left wants to erase these firmly held religious beliefs they don’t agree with. Their battle’s not just with us, it’s with the Bill of Rights, it’s with the United States Constitution.
