In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation was unconstitutional, finally cashing the proverbial “check” the United States government wrote to its citizens in the Constitution, guaranteeing liberty and justice for all people.

Sixty years later, some states are still debating whether or not they should discriminate.

Recently, a bill was proposed in Kansas that would protect “the religious freedom of businesses and individuals to refuse services to same-sex couples”, according to USA Today.

This should sound familiar.

Many citizens have likened this bill to the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the southern United States for nearly a century. These laws made it acceptable for businesses to provide “separate but equal” services to blacks and whites or to deny service to blacks in general.

Although the bill passed through Kansas’ House of Representatives, it was struck down in the Senate.

This bill and those like it not only violate the Constitution by promoting discrimination under the guise of protecting religious freedom, but also set a deplorable example for other states and raise questions about the American public’s commitment to upholding the values of the Constitution for all people, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Many Eleanor Roosevelt High School students and teachers said they believe bills and laws like these are wrong and unfair.

Senior Lindsey Wright feels that businesses “shouldn’t be able to discriminate against people just because [they] don’t agree” with their sexuality.

And according to science teacher Mr. Sean Brady, it is “unfortunate that businesses are looking for legal justification to discriminate.”

In a society already plagued by bullying, such extravagant displays of homophobia would send a message that discrimination against and mistreatment of members of the LGBT community are excused and acceptable.

A bill like this in America would reinstall Jim Crow-era values and could potentially reverse the movements made by remarkable individuals and landmark cases such as Rosa Parks and Brown v. Board of Education.

Students and our community should rally against such proposed legislation, and if laws like this are passed, we should fight to overturn them, just as our predecessors did against Jim Crow laws.

In his essay Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau argued that if a law requires you to be the “agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law,” and we should, when appropriate, do the same and fight such laws.