The uproar over the religious freedom bill vetoed Wednesday by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is expected to have a chilling effect on the handful of similar bills making their way through other state legislatures.

Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union said they were cheered by the veto during a telephone press briefing Thursday, calling it a thrilling day for equality, but said that theyre keeping an eye on bills in other states, including Georgia, Mississippi and Missouri.

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These proposals would create a license to discriminate, said Rose Saxe, senior staff attorney with the ACLUs LGBT Project. A significant majority of them are not about cakes and wedding services, as the other side would have us think, but are actually about all aspects of LGBT peoples lives.

At least seven other states have seen similar bills either killed or withdrawn this year. The most prominent was a Kansas bill that would have allowed business owners to refuse service to customers based on their religious beliefs, which stalled in the state Senate after a similar outcry from gay rights groups.

Many of those defeats, culminating in the Arizona veto, came after gay rights groups successfully defined the bills as pro-discrimination, declaring they would allow businesses to return to the days of Jim Crow laws in the South. The bill was also vociferously opposed by the states leading business groups and corporations.

Proponents of the measures insisted that the bills would do nothing of the sort. The measures were originally proposed to protect business owners from being forced to violate their religious beliefs by catering to gay weddings or risk losing their licenses.

Joe La Rue, legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom in Scottsdale, said that argument has been largely drowned out by the media outcry.

[W]hen they started talking about, This bill is going to turn us back to the days of Jim Crow, and youre going to have people kicked out of restaurants, and youre going to have people dying in the streets because doctors wont treat them nobody wants that, said Mr. La Rue. Frankly, the supporters of the bill dont want that, and they would never do that.

Once that message took root, however, the bill was doomed, he said.

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Arizona veto likely to chill other religious freedom bills