On March 26, Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) into law. The bill has resulted in a huge backlash against Indiana. Countless people across the country have labeled our state as bigoted and backwards. The criticism has died down, but this whole debacle was a preventable situation that was just the result of a lack of common sense.

First, some clarification of the RFRA is necessary. Contrary to popular belief, the RFRA is not a license for private business owners to discriminate. It does not make it legal for a coffee shop owner to deny customers just because they are gay. It does, however, prevent the government from discriminating against religious Americans in court. All this bill does is reaffirm the principle of the First Amendment, freedom of religion. So, when people are on trial, they can use their religious beliefs as a means for defense in court. It does not mean that they are right or that they will win.

Some say that Indiana’s RFRA does promote discrimination because the LGBT community is not specifically protected in our state Civil Rights laws, but that’s a different i ssue. With that argument, a store owner could have discriminated with or without the bill. The RFRA itself has nothing to do with discrimination; it does not give legal backing for business owners to discriminate against the LGBT community.

However, for the majority of the public has turned this bill into a gross misinterpretation. A New York Times article that begins with “A new law in Indiana allowing businesses to refuse service to same-sex couples in the name of religious freedom” is an example of how the RFRA has been skewed. Countless misinformed people, including me, taking to social media to deplore the bill sure doesn’t help either, but the blame doesn’t just fall on one side. Those who applaud the law and want to use the RFRA as legal backing to “deny gays” are simply wrong as. The RFRA does not allow that. It has nothing to do with discrimination.

So why has the RFRA been so misinterpreted? Blame our state legislature.

You may have thought that I was defending our lawmakers, but I’m not. I’m merely defending the bill. A huge reason why this bill was labeled discriminatory was because of the way our lawmakers handled it. There seemed to be a mission to prove that Indiana was still a socially conservative safe haven after it lost a battle against same-sex marriage last year, but despite ideological differences, this huge backlash still should not have happened.

Long before this bill landed on the Governor’s desk, the majority of Hoosiers were against it. They knew that large organizations like Gen Con and the NCAA-valuable assets to our state’s economy-were against it. They knew that signing this bill, albeit somewhat unwarranted, would cause huge backlash to our state. Yet despite all of these “warning signs” our lawmakers passed the bill without any clear clarification for what the bill truly was and how it would affect us.

Misunderstandings happen everyday and to everyone. But when a harmless piece of legislation is interpreted as license to discriminate and causes most Americans to turn on our state, then we have a problem. The media can always say they want to churn up big stories, and the public can just say they’re misinformed, but our lawmakers should have no excuse. There is no reasonable explanation for why our lawmakers cannot carefully consider the consequences of a bill and make sure everyone understands what it does before it is signed into law.

This column isn’t about ideological differences or partisan politics. It’s about common sense. Something our state government needs. They knowingly rolled out a misunderstood bill without proper clarification and directly led our state to much criticism. That is not good leadership, much less basic governance. They made a mistake and they know it. Governor Pence went on multiple local and national news outlets hoping to clarify the law and signed a provision on April 2 that would ensure the RFRA won’t be used as legal backing for discrimination, but this reaction could have been avoided in the first place. The way the roll-out of the RFRA has been handled by our state legislature sets a dangerous precedent of misgovernance. The entire RFRA debacle should be used as a lesson: no bill should be signed into law without proper clarification from our lawmakers. It’s something that should’ve been common sense.

The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach Alex Yom at [email protected].