Last week the Mississippi state legislature passed a law that allows for wide-scale LGBT discrimination. It puts the state head and shoulders above other states such as North Carolina, which is already facing economic recriminations for its so-called “religious liberty” bill.
But what did you expect from a state where they still have things like this happening?
The landlord at a Mississippi RV park admitted over the weekend that he evicted a couple because they were interracial.
Gene Baker told The Clarion-Ledger that he asked Erica Flores Dunahoo and her African-American husband, Stanley Hoskins, to leave his RV park in Tupelo because “the neighbors were giving me such a problem.”
Dunahoo, who is Native American and Hispanic, explained to the paper that she and her husband moved into the RV Park in February to save money and get their life “back on track.”
“He was real nice,” she said of Baker. “He invited me to church and gave me a hug. I bragged on him to my family.”
Dunahoo said that she paid $275 in rent on Feb. 28, but Baker called the next day with bad news.
“Hey, you didn’t tell me you was married to no black man,” Dunahoo recalled Baker saying. “Oh, it’s a big problem with the members of my church, my community and my mother-in-law… They don’t allow that black and white shacking.”
Although Dunahoo pointed out that she was not “shacking” with her husband because they are married, Baker reportedly insisted that it is “the same thing.”
“You don’t talk like you wouldn’t be with no black man,” Baker allegedly said. “If you would had come across like you were with a black man, we wouldn’t have this problem right now.”
“My husband ain’t no thug,” Dunahoo argued. “He’s a good man. My husband has served his country for 13 years. He’s a sergeant in the National Guard.”
Dunahoo said that Baker returned the couple’s rent money, and that they were in the process of relocating to a more expensive RV Park.
Some would consider it progress in Mississippi that they were allowed to leave the RV park without being lynched.
“You don’t talk like you wouldn’t be with no black man,” Baker allegedly said.
It would take me days to unpack this sentence…
It’s like a line out of “In The Heat of the Night.”
It should come as a surprise to no one that the “religious belief” exemption would be expanded to include everything, not just LGBT. Hello Jim Crow you just left and here you are,back again under official code of law. The more things change the more they stay the same!