Tourism cheerleaders in Indiana have been taking stock of their dimmed prospects after this spring's struggle over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
For all the talk about businesses thinking about pulling up stakes due to the impression — intended or not by General Assembly members — that protecting religious freedom also meant marginalizing gays and lesbians, the most immediate backlash against Indiana came in the form of convention traffic veering elsewhere.
It only took a few multi-million conventions to pull out of Indianapolis and other cities to put the legislators' blind spot on RFRA's perceived discrimination into full view.
Last week, visitors bureau insiders considered the next potential victim washing up on the RFRA shore: the state's latest tourism slogan, "Honest to Goodness Indiana."
The question was whether the (ahem) beloved slogan introduced in 2014 would survive the state rebranding that's bound to come now that Indiana hired Porter Novelli, a New York City-based PR firm, to help sell Indiana as a welcoming place.
Joining the voices was Jo Wade, president of Visit Lafayette-West Lafayette.
"It's difficult to see 'Honest to Goodness' as a slogan for state tourism at this point in time," Wade told the Indianapolis Business Journal. "People want to grab anything they can to remember their anger toward our state, and 'Honest to Goodness' could be a flare-up. At the time we passed RFRA, people didn't see that as honest or good."
Writing premature obituaries for a slogan that was roundly mocked for making Indiana look folksy in the hokiest of ways might be as misguided as tourism officials pushing blame for its demise on a religious freedom bill.
But the truth is that dealing with the state's image is going to cost Indiana.