If the Republican Party wanted to demonstrate that it wants no votes from anyone under 40, it couldn’t have found a better way to do it. […] It’s the kind of law that Vladimir Putin would enthusiastically support. But it is also, to my mind, a fatal mis-step for the movement to keep gay citizens in a marginalized, stigmatized place.

It’s a misstep because it so clearly casts the anti-gay movement as the heirs to Jim Crow. If you want to taint the Republican right as nasty bigots who would do to gays today what Southerners did to segregated African-Americans in the past, you’ve now got a text-book case.

I don’t think Andrew Sullivan, british author and blogger, could be accused of being hyperbolic on his recent piece, “What The Hell Just Happened in Kansas?”

I’m especially interested in what he says the reaction of the LGBT community (or, you know, decent people who are against toxic discrimination against a subset of society) should be to the bill:

And to my mind, a better approach for gay couples and their families is not to try and coerce fundamentalist individuals and businesses into catering to them, but in publicizing the cases of discrimination and shaming them — and then actively seeking out and rewarding individuals and businesses who are not so constrained.

I’ve often wondered what tack members of the LGBT community should take in the face of hateful bigotry, and I’m coming around to Sullivan’s line of thinking that we should vote with our feet. Refuse to patronize antagonistic institutions and services, and reward those who support (or even acknowledge) us. For the most part, the anti-gay movement seems to be immune to facts and hostile to progress. It doesn’t seem to be possible to debate with these people, so it’s time to leave them behind.

Tommy Collison is a student and activist. He writes tommycollison.com and studies journalism & politics at NYU.