Best option may be to step back

Here’s a bit of advice for our state lawmakers: Let’s just slow down and do this right.
In the aftermath of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the “fix” that was implemented last year, the Indiana General Assembly is now struggling to come up with legislative language that will make everyone happy.
The odds of that happening are somewhere between slim and none, and our money is on none.
While State Sen. Travis Holdman seems sincere in his desire to craft a bill that will satisfy the Republican party base without setting off another national media firestorm, the efforts so far have not been encouraging.
Instead, by trying to have it both ways simultaneously — “prohibiting” discrimination while creating a religious exception to do exactly that — Holdman’s efforts virtually guarantee the matter will end up being decided by the courts.
There’s an essential contradiction at the heart of the bill that lawmakers don’t want to address. Punting the issue to the courts may make sense politically, but it’s bad public policy.
Sen. Holdman’s latest version of the legislation would, in addition to its inherent contradictions, shove the whole matter of full rights for citizens who happen to be transgender into a study committee. And while that at first looks like something of a cop-out, he may be onto something.
In a short legislative session with a host of other issues like roads and education, why rush to “fix” the “fix”?
As lawmakers and Gov. Mike Pence learned last year, public opinion on questions involving the lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender community are evolving rapidly. Positions that had wide support five years ago have been junked by most folks today. And there’s every reason to believe views are going to continue to evolve.
Why not, as House Majority Leader Matt Lehman of Adams County has suggested, set the whole thing aside for a year? Study it, listen to people, do the homework and remove it from the politics of an election year.
Right now, so much of what passes for legislating at the Statehouse is simply a matter of taking positions that will play well with a party’s voters in November.
Let’s remove LGBT questions from the mix for the time being, allowing last year’s “fix” to stand for now while public opinion continues to evolve then address the matter as thoughtfully as possible in 2017 during the General Assembly’s long session.
That won’t satisfy everybody, but it makes more sense that continuing to blunder forward. — J.R.