Michigan's House Speaker Jase Bolger says he's "struggling" with the issue of adding gays to the state's Elliott-Larsen anti-discrimination law, which protects citizens in housing, employment, and other areas on religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, height, weight, familial status or marital status, MLive reports:
“I want to respect gay individuals. I don't want to send a message as a society that we are intolerant," Bolger said. "I think that we need to respect people who are different from us, whether they're different because they believe differently, whether they're different because they have different skin color, or whether they're different because they're straight or gay. The other side of that equation is I also want to respect people's religious beliefs. And that's where the struggle really comes in. I want to respect gay people, I want to respect people who have deeply held religious beliefs.
“And so legally – as a lawmaker now – you go back and you look at Elliott-Larsen," Bolger continued. "And it gets very difficult to try to balance those two. And that encapsulates the struggle. The struggle is how do we respect individuals on both sides of this question. I want to respect the individual rights of someone who's gay. And I also, in doing that, don't want to force somebody to ignore or violate their religious beliefs.”
