Seth Meyers explains how The Walking Dead helped kill Georgia's anti-gay bill

(Image credit: Late Night)

published 31 March 2016

The Republican-led state legislatures in Georgia and North Carolina just passed two bills targeting gay and transgender citizens, but that's about where the similarity ends. Seth Meyers looked at both bills on Wednesday's Late Night, putting them in the context of the larger GOP pushback against gay marriage. North Carolina's bill, which Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed, prohibits local LGBT nondiscrimination laws, and Meyers had bad things to say about it. But he spent most of the segment looking at the "religious liberty" bill in Georgia.

The Georgia bill would allow faith-based organizations to fire people based on sexual orientation, but it had a pretty broad definition of who qualifies as "faith based." "That's right, the bill would have qualified Chick-Fil-A as 'faith-based,'" Meyers said, "although to be fair, anywhere 15-year-olds are cooking your dinner, you're operating on faith." Worse, the KKK might have also qualified as faith-based, as the bill's sponsor awkwardly acknowledged. It didn't become law.

Gov. Nathan Deal (R) not only said he will veto the bill, Meyers said, but "to Deal's credit, he had already expressed some pretty strong objections to the bill before it even passed, urging his fellow Republicans not to use religion to discriminate against others." Now, Deal "also had some self-interested reasons" for vetoing the bill, "given how many major national companies had threatened to stop doing business in Georgia if the bill became law," Meyers explained, naming Disney, Marvel Studios, and AMC. "That's right, if this bill had become law, The Walking Dead would have stopped filming in Georgia — which would have been terrible since The Walking Dead employs thousands of Georgians every week." You can watch Meyers do a terrible Southern accent, portray Atlantans as zombies, and learn more about the state of anti-LGBT legislation in the video below. Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.