“I know there are a lot of Georgians who feel like this is a necessary step for us to take”, Deal said during deliberations over the bill.
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The governor has until May 3 to officially decide. “We don’t have a time frame”, Deal told the Atlanta Journal Constitution Thursday night, referring to the measure.
The bill – HB 757 – gives faith-based organizations in Georgia the option to deny services to gay people.
The bill would strengthen legal protections for opponents of same-sex marriages and allow faith-based organizations in Georgia to refuse services to anyone they find “objectionable”.
The bill says the government can’t intrude on the religious rights of an organization or an individual unless it has a strong interest to do so.
Similar efforts in IN and Arkansas also ignited battles over the past year but a movie boycott in Georgia could have a disastrous economic fallout.
The Human Rights Campaign noted that only California and NY have a larger entertainment industry footprint than Georgia and both those states have laws protecting against discrimination.
Signatures on the letter include include Gus Van Sant, Harvey Weinstein Aaron Sorkin, Seth MacFarlane, Greg Berlanti and Ryan Murphy, as well as actors Anne Hathaway and Julianne Moore.
We urge you to veto H.B.
The threat comes amid mounting anger in the film world over a so-called religious liberty bill passed by legislators in the southern American state which opponents say amounts to anti-gay bigotry.
“The fact that the state would embed in its law authorization for discrimination, runs counter to the film industry’s history of pushing back against this type of legislation”, says Abrams. “Although I was excited to see all of the different companies say, ‘Hey if you don’t fix this, we aren’t going to come and work here, ‘ at the same time it was also very frightening to me”, she explains. Disney, Netflix, The Weinstein Company have all threatened to boycott Georgia if the bill is signed and Viacom, Time Warner, Fox, Sony, MGM, CBS, Comcast/NBC Universal and many other studios have spoken out against the bill.
Georgia has become a haven for movie and television production because of attractive tax incentives offered to studios that film there.
In a statement released by the studio on Friday, Perry, whose 200,000-square-foot TP Studios complex is Atlanta based, encouraged Republican Gov. Nathan Deal to reject a bill that discriminates against the LGBT community. Almost 250 film and television pilots, series and commercials were also shot in 2015. .7 billion to be exact. “Whether the laws and regulations of a state and local community are consistent with these policies would be one of the many factors National Football League owners may use to evaluate potential Super Bowl host sites”. But a boycott from the entertainment goliath-in a state that is now raking in a substantial amount of money from the film production industry-may be a much larger cause for congressional pause. ABC, which is owned by Disney, is filming a remake of Dirty Dancing in North Carolina, the state that just struck down a Charlotte ordinance that would have allowed transgender people to use the bathrooms that matched their gender identity.
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Conservatives who supported the religious liberty bill did not realize how far-reaching the economic consequences of the legislation could be, some filmmakers contend. Producer Brian Tolleson predicted the backlash from the beginning.
