The Indiana law is an embarrassment. I am a lifelong Midwesterner - grew up in Cincinnati OH, lived in St. Louis MO for past 30 years. If anyone thinks, well, this just affects gays, butch-ish women (think preppie), and nebbishy guys not wearing camo, think again. The most obvious targets are going to be 1. the OTHER favorite punching bags, brown skinned people with foreign names, Jews, blacks 2. straight women (in employment matters). What this law says is that discrimination is legal if done for "sincere" religious reasons, and that ALL for-profit businesses can claim religious convictions.
Do you honestly think that there aren't any Indiana (Arkansas, Missouri) businesses that wouldn't hire or serve blacks because the owner "sincerely" believes that race mixing is agin' his religion? We have several explicit White Supremacy churches in Missouri, in the small towns.
The amount of hysteria shown by suburban and exurban/rural white people over the Ferguson MO affair was ridiculous - suburban housewives were taking gun lessons and buying guns before the verdict came out. I think that the Meetup outdoors club people I go hiking with (different people each time) are generally ordinary nice-enough (overwhelmingly white) people, but I was hearing all sorts of paranoia, and people thought I was crazy for not being very concerned for my safety and telling them that if they didn't drive straight through Ferguson, they would be just fine. I live 5 miles from Ferguson, 2 miles from another hot-spot, work at an inner city hospital with scads of black co-workers whose main concerns were for their commuting route and possibly their own safety if they lived in or within a mile of Ferguson.
My cynical thought this past year has been - St Louis hasn't changed in 30 years concerning race. I want to shout, Grow Up Already.