Religious people by nature aren’t really into logic or intellectual consistency. Religion is 90% tradition, 10% text. There’s really no logical reason for Christians to focus on homosexuality. It’s something that gets mentioned only once specifically and never touched on again, and the other prohibitions are on fornication in general. Not mixing milk and meat are mentioned several times, and doing no work on the Sabbath is mentioned dozens of times, and yet Christians draw the conclusion that homosexuality is like the top priority, the primary enemy of all that is good and right in the world. As a Jew, I say that killing pigs for meat is the enemy of all that’s good and right in the world. Pigs are intelligent creatures, they aren’t food!
But I digress. Freedom of religion is not freedom to follow your religion correctly or logically, it’s freedom to follow your faith as you interpret it. Just as freedom of speech doesn’t apply only to correct speech, you are allowed to be wrong and in most circumstances you can even lie.
I don’t think religions require their adherents to open a business at all. That’s why I don’t buy the argument that business decisions constitute the free exercise of religion. As for sincere beliefs, they’re irrelevant. This concerns actions, not beliefs. The business owners can believe whatever they choose.
Freedom of religion is merely a truism if it’s strictly personal and can’t be carried into the public square. Imagine if freedom of speech or freedom of assembly worked that way. “Yes, we support those things, but only if you keep it to yourself!”
But you realize that is not consistent with the existing jurisprudence, right? I mean, it’s great that you have that opinion, but the courts don’t agree. Business decisions don’t have to constitution the exercise of religion, but they can. Hence the recent Hobby Lobby case.
Again, the court does not agree with this as an absolute rule.
Sure, there are individuals in every church who believe all kinds of things. My argument was that most mainline Christian thought is that homosexuality is sinful. It is in the Bible, after all, with nothing contradicting it. And I’ve never read a convincing argument from liberal churches about why they believe differently other than that “liberal” church types just want to be secular and still go to heaven.
So again, the idea that homosexuality is sinful is not exactly a controversial position in the Christian world. It is the position of the vast majority of Congregations. How individuals within those congregations think is totally up to them. And in a just world, we’d all answer to the God we believe in. But by that standard 90% of us would probably be sent to a place where Donald Trump is President.
If the law requires the business owner to violate his religious beliefs, then the beliefs are relevant, regardless of what you “buy.”
As an example, the dissent in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby said of the majority:
Who cares what you personally buy? I care what the Supreme Court buys. Your purchasing habits are not aligned with the Court’s, so what relevance have they here?
The decision actually wasn’t even that broad. There are very few things that businesses are willing to go to the mat for on religious practice, and as long as that’s the case I see no problem with some exemptions. Hobby Lobby in particular only objected to two particular drugs they were supposed to cover.
Also, one way to avoid having broad SCOTUS decisions is to not take cases to the Supreme Court. I was always amazed at how the Obama administration was so willing to take big issues all the way up that they had to know they’d lose. If they’d just granted a few exemptions as requested the bigger question would have remained open.
This is from 2014, but it’s a bit surprising that half of Americans think gay sex is a sin, despite increasing acceptance of SSM. It could be a signal that quite a few folks don’t think every sin should be illegal.
Does this bakery insist in meeting or interviewing the couples that are their customers as part of the cake design process? Did this couple want a custom cake that was substantially different from a straight people wedding cake?
Because if they don’t, what’s to stop someone from ordering a cake for their wedding without revealing the gender of their spouse?
Now — and this is a partially serious question.
Say Masterpiece Bakery wins their lawsuit.
And afterwards, one or more couples order wedding cakes without revealing that they are for a same sex wedding. Maybe only one person orders the cake, or maybe the guy brings his sister in with him.
Then maybe there will be one or more gay weddings prominently featuring cakes from Masterpiece Bakery. And maybe those weddings will get a lot of play on social media. And maybe those posts will feature cake photos and credit Masterpiece Bakery for the cake.
Will the owners of Masterpiece Bakery be able to sue the couples for violating their religious freedom?
And if they win, I really hope the scenario I described above happens. A lot.
The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches maintain that homosexuality is a sin. I’ve read all of Leviticus. Being a Jew, that shit still applies to me.
What are Catholics, Christian chopped liver? Maybe on an individual basis, many Catholics are more tolerant of homosexuality than official doctrine is, but I imagine that the definition of what’s a sin is based on the doctrine and not on the masses.
In my opinion, not successfully, unless there’s more to the story. There is a tort of “False Light,” but as I understand it, to win a false light claim you’d have to show that the publication of the false information about you (in this case, that you endorsed a same-sex union) is an embarrassing one to reasonable persons. I doubt this showing can be made.
When we’re speaking of Americans, about 25% are Evangelicals and 25% are Catholic. That pretty much covers about 50% of the population in terms of religions that regard gay sex as sinful, and we haven’t even touched on any of the other Christian sects or Jewish or Moslem either. It’s certainly not some fringe view, even if most of us here don’t adhere to it. Many of us are not even religious, so the idea of “sin”, in a religious sense, is not even meaningful.