There is no right to impose belief on another, but there is no right to never be exposed to religious belief as a non-believer goes about his or her public life. In that sense the believer perhaps is in the proverbial driver’s seat. Such is the price we pay for freedom of religious expression.
This line between imposing belief and exposing someone to a religious practice seems to raise the hackles of some. When a proselytizing believer knocks on your door and says, to borrow a phrase from the musical The Book of Mormon (video at link), “Hello, would you like to change religions? I’ve got a free book written by Jesus.” is that imposing belief in a legally impermissible way or the free exercise of the believer’s religion? I suspect the law would say that the believer’s proselytizing is protected and permissible. And you are stuck responding in a civilized manner. Civilized in that your response must not be an assault or the like, but you can freely communicate your answer. Freedom of Speech and all.
On the contrary, it seems to me that there is a bright and obvious line between the right to proselytize (which I have seen nobody dispute) and the infringement of civil rights under the banner of religious belief. Any discussion about “imposing belief” here has been entirely about the latter.
Do you have a cite for the “victim” part? We accept Catholicism even though everyone else is supposedly doomed to Hell.
And who is a “victim” of religion? Two guys that could have popped into the next cake shop down the road?
I understand how times have changed regarding beliefs about homosexuality, but the Constitution guarantees a FREEDOM of religion, not just respect for it, or tolerance, or any notice of its “victims” as you call them. If we were talking about hanging witches or burning at the stake, I could understand this “victim” talk, but it’s not being able to buy a fucking cake…at one single store. oh, the horrors!
It is easy for us when we look at other societies and other religions. In those cases, we habitually note the human-rights violation that is being promoted or perpetrated, and assume with hardly a second thought that only a defective religion (or defective religious leaders) could produce such a situation. It just turns out that enough of us are becoming grown-up enough to realize that our own religion is not exempt.
That is more than utterly ridiculous. It is just a way to claim the people fighting for LGBT rights are all horrible people. Yes, you included a disclaimer, but it’s not really any different than Trump’s “And some, I assume, are good people.”
I mean, if that was anyone’s goal, they would have already lost, since the guy has made it quite clear that, if he can’t discriminate, he will just stop making wedding cakes altogether. So no one would ever forced to “promote LGBT [sic].”
As for the ruling, my reading is that Kennedy actually leaned a lot towards saying that religion could not trump anti-discrimination. He included a lot of unnecessary stuff otherwise. All he had to show was that the original hearing was hostile towards religion and must be redone. It seems he basically went out of his way to tell them it would be okay if they ruled the same way again, as long as they left out the remarks that were even slightly negative towards religion.
But, even if that reading is wrong, he definitely did not say the opposite.
So individual rights are dependent on the proximity of a reasonable alternative and the degree to which the product being sold is deemed to be a necessity? What if the nearest store that would sell them a cake was a mile away? 10 miles? 100 miles? The next state? Where do you draw the boundary that says “Past this point - but no closer - your rights have been violated”? And what if they were trying to buy bread and milk instead of a cake? Or baby food? Or gas for their car? What if the nearest gas station that would serve them was further away than they had fuel to reach? Should we have a government-approved list of essentials that store owners are required to sell to everyone, and anything else is discretionary?
The reason rights aren’t conditional on these bases is because these bases are irrelevant to the validity of the rights. You can scoff and say “oh the horrors”, but the very real horrors of sundowner towns are still visible in our rearview mirrors, which is why such antidiscrimination laws came into being in the first place.
Freedom of religion means that the government treats people equally regardless of their religious views. It means a Christian has a right to obey the law in the same way as a non-Christian. (And the ruling of the court was in keeping with that. So far. Who knows what the next case will bring.)
I have my doubts about whether he would have said the same thing about members of a non-minority faith, but in any case, Justice Scalia was correct about how absurd it is for religious freedom to work any other way.
The Supreme Court explicitly rejected strict scrutiny for religion in 1990 (Employment Division v. Smith), and further prohibited Congress from imposing it on the states in 1997 (City of Boerne v. Flores).
Gays who are hindered in their attempts to buy wedding cakes. It’s been in the news.
Just like blacks in the South could have just traveled on to a non-sunset town, right?
Not just respect? Not even in the clause saying “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”? That’s as far as it goes, telling the government to stay out of it.
This is a case, once again, of two rights conflicting, this time the ones defined in the 1st and 14th. Neither has precedence, and the conflict must be resolved with justice, in a justice system that does, however, place consideration for the real over consideration for the theoretical or feigned.
Where is the line for you? When does the special pleading stop, or does it?