One could venture to guess that the political activists of the 1960s would be (or are, if they are alive to witness the present state of politics) perplexed by the current regression to a pre-Civil Rights era. Maybe the “fruits of their labor” were more fragile than they appeared to be. Or, perhaps more provocatively, their efforts fell short. This can surely be said of same-sex marriage, of which the actions taken in the 60s failed of their effect.

Then again, you cannot change how people feel — this falls within the duty of culture. As the punch line of a popular Buddhist joke would have it, “Change comes from within.”

We now play audience to some of the most egregious acts against the spirit of that era. It is the mission of younger generations to take up the fight against discrimination and participate in the cross-generational cause.

Hopefully the standard-bearers will continue to lead the charge against states like Arizona, which recently attempted to institute legislation protecting the discriminators rather than the discriminated.

The Arizona State Legislature sent a bill to the Governor’s office, which would have allowed businesses to deny service to customers for religious reasons. As supporters of the bill have stated, “people should be free to live and work according to their faith.”

The controversial legislation was vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer.

It is obvious, however, that the intention of the bill was to establish an attack, perhaps more appropriately called a counterattack, on recent progress in the same-sex marriage movement.

Any sensible person can see this as a rather surreptitious attempt to license discrimination. Currently, there is only the risk of litigation. If the bill had passed, businesses would, once again, have had the freedom to discriminate against a person because of whom they are — nevermind the frivolous “no shirts, no shoes” policies or the actual compelling interests to deny service.

The Center for Arizona Policy, a conservative group that advocated for the bill’s passage, issued a statement: “As we witness hostility towards people of faith grow like never before, we must take this opportunity to speak up for religious liberty.”

The Center for Arizona Policy seems to be operating under a grave misapprehension. What hostility towards people of faith is there to speak of? Christians command an overwhelming swath of the “faithful.” According to a Pew Research religious landscape survey, the U.S. adult population is 78.4% Christian. Surely the majority cannot feel so acutely persecuted.

To dig deeper, the “faithful” should be narrowed to the religious fundamentalists. After all, there do exist religious factions that support same-sex marriage. But, to effectively cut through the cheap guise of “religious liberty,” we have to uproot the perpetrators with candidness – those perpetrators being the fundamentalists.

Religious liberty does not certify religious fundamentalists to discriminate against anyone they wish. Not only would this reinforce a general — and arguably unnecessary — resentment of the homosexual population, but also the growing contentions between the religious factions themselves. I can certainly imagine, for instance, a practicing Muslim denied the same services (or vice versa, if you’d wish).

The question is whether or not businesses can actually deny service under these pretenses while keeping consistent with federal law. Luckily we have our brothers and sisters of the 1960s who, through great struggle, solidified an answer to that question long ago.

According to the Federal Civil Rights Act all people have the right to “full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”

Essentially, there are expressly defined classes protected from arbitrary discrimination by business owners. This is not to say businesses do not enjoy the freedom to do business as they wish but that those rights do not supersede the rights of others.

Religious liberty is not diminished by this; rather, it is strengthened. Christians cannot be denied a service just as well as a Muslim cannot. There is, however, the First Amendment which provides the salient defense of religious freedom while maintaining the spirit of secularism.

Of course, by calling upon the Civil Rights Act, there is no intention to compare same-sex marriage rights to the ultimate defeat of segregation (although the pestilence of racism may never subside). However, the gay rights movement is merely a continuation of that spirit, and the younger generations now carry the fight.

It is by embracing the same idea of equality that the human solidarity, as tried and weathered as it is, strengthens.

If this bill had passed, though, it would have only proven, as it has been time and time again, how easy it is to get away with discrimination when operating under the banner of faith.