A Mississippi funeral home gave a frank reason for its refusal to handle the dead body of a man who was married to another man: It, allegedly, doesn’t “deal with their kind.”
The nephew of the same-sex couple had made all the arrangements. The Picayune Funeral Home would receive the body from the nursing home where Robert Huskey, who was 86 when he died, had been staying since he developed a serious heart disease. Since the Picayune Funeral Home had the only on-site crematorium in the county and was nearby (allowing a memorial luncheon), it seemed like the best option. The nephew and the funeral home reached a verbal agreement.
But after Huskey died in May 2016, the funeral home found out, through filed paperwork, that Huskey was married to Jack Zawadski, his partner of 52 years. According to a lawsuit filed by LGBTQ group Lambda Legal, that’s when the funeral pulled out.
“I felt as if all the air had been knocked out of me,” Zawadski said in a statement. “Bob was my life, and we had always felt so welcome in this community. And then, at a moment of such personal pain and loss, to have someone do what they did to me, to us, to Bob, I just couldn’t believe it. No one should be put through what we were put through.”
Because the nursing home didn’t have a morgue and therefore couldn’t hold the body, the family had to scramble to find another funeral home to hold Huskey’s body and then another funeral home — one 90 miles away — to handle the cremation. Due to the distance, the family couldn’t hold a memorial luncheon as originally planned.
Zawadski, with the help of Lambda, is now suing the Picayune Funeral Home, along with its parent company, Brewer Funeral Services, for breach of contract, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, and negligent misrepresentation. (The funeral home has refused to comment to media, citing legal advice from an attorney.)
But here’s the shocking truth: The type of discrimination that the funeral home is engaging in is, in fact, legal in most states across the US. Most states and the federal government don’t have any laws that explicitly ban anti-LGBTQ discrimination in any setting, creating a situation in which a funeral home can refuse to service a same-sex couple just because of their sexual orientation.
Anti-LGBTQ discrimination isn’t explicitly illegal in most states
As it stands, most states and the federal government lack explicit nondiscrimination laws for LGBTQ people in the workplace, housing, public accommodations (restaurants, hotels, funeral homes, and other places that serve the public), and school. This means that a person can be fired from a job, evicted from a home, kicked out of a business, or denied the right school bathroom just because an employer, landlord, business owner, or principal doesn’t approve of the person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Civil rights laws, going back to the 1960s at the federal level, prohibit discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in all or some these settings. But these laws haven’t been expanded to explicitly include sexual orientation or gender identity in most of America.
Some advocates argue that federal law should already protect LGBTQ people. They say that bans on sex discrimination, which exist under federal law, should cover LGBTQ people, because discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity is fundamentally rooted in sex. For example, if someone discriminates against a gay man, that’s largely based on the expectation that a man should only love or have sex with a woman — a belief built on the idea of what a person of a certain sex should be like.
But not all courts have legally validated this argument. And even if they did, it would not apply nationwide to public accommodations, because federal law doesn’t ban sex discrimination in public accommodations.
So for the time being, LGBTQ people aren’t explicitly protected under the law in most states. And that allows cases like Zawadski and Huskey’s to happen over and over again.