The law does not directly permit businesses to turn away customers based on the business-owner’s religious beliefs. Nothing in the law specifically mentions whether a business may turn away anyone. Rather, if a customer sued a business under an anti-discrimination law and the business owner believed that serving this customer violated his or her religious beliefs, the business owner could make a defense based on a “substantial burden” claim. In order for the case against the business owner to produce a guilty verdict, the government would need to state what its goal was and show that it was achieving that goal through the least restrictive possible means. It would be up to the courts to determine whether the case met the law’s standards. It might, or it might not; there’s certainly nothing in the law guaranteeing that any business owner could simply turn away customers based on religious beliefs.
All research that I’ve seen suggests that the percent of businesses which would turn away anyone because of sexual orientation is, at most, very, very, very small. I’ve seen no evidence that any person, gay or straight, is having any difficulty buying anything because of their sexual orientation.
I pointed out that the purpose of this law is to defend religious freedom. Your response (post #64) implied that the only purpose for the law was allowing business owners to turn away gays. In fact, the law protects religious freedom for all religions against all types of government interference, and I’ve given a list of examples of cases that were won thanks to RFRAs. So your claim that the RFRA only protects business owners who want to turn away gays is clearly false.
In the not so distant past, black people could not travel across the country (without great difficulty). No, their travel was not prohibited by any law. But, common carriers would not carry them on their planes, trains, and buses. If they had a car, their travel was limited to whatever was in a day’s range of home. If the destination was more than a day away, the black traveler would not have any place he or she could spend the night because hotels, motels, and campgrounds prohibited black people.
Fast forward to today.
Indiana is relatively small, so there are no destinations more than a day’s drive away. However, my home of Texas is considering the same sort of law. So, assuming that a motel/hotel/campground manager can discern a visitor’s sexuality (which is somewhat more challenging than determining skin color), a gay person cannot travel more than a day’s range from home. From where I sit right now, there are lots of destinations more than a day away and still well within Texas.
Are you aware that in places like Idaho and Montana you can drive 50 miles before you get to the next “town”. Often that town is nothing more than a gas station and a restaurant. So a town with a hotel, a family restaurant, a hardees, a pharmacy, a hardware store, an auto parts store, a grocery, and a gas station may be 100 miles apart. So, a gay couple pulls into the hotel at 2AM and ask for a room with a single bed. They are refused service. They now have to drive another 100 miles and hope the next hotel wont turn them away.
The fact that this is not a “common” occurrence makes no difference at 2AM in the morning. The fact that they can take the hotel to court at some later date does them no good at 2AM in the morning when they are 100 miles away from the next nearest hotel.
Who knows what they were thinking, but someone in the legislature requested an analysis of the law from Columbia Law school which gained thirty signatures from various legally knowledgeable people, many who are law professors at Indiana.
The idea that they just didn’t expect the backlash doesn’t hold, because the backlash started well before the law was signed. The only thing I can think is that they thought people were bluffing.
And the governor has already admitted that he’s going to need to get a clarification bill that will remove the threat to gay people. Thing is, it’s probably going to have to be bigger than if they’d listened to the Democrats. I suspect that they could have previously gotten away with a clause saying that it did not in any way impinge on local civil rights laws. You know, language like “This law does not in any way change the rights of federal, state, or local protected classes.” Now I think it’s going to have to at least be explicitly about gay people, if not actually affirming their rights.
There have been plenty of answers. You’re just ignoring them.
RFRAs have been used to protect the right of:
-the Native American Church members to use Peyote
-the UDV church to import hoasca tea
-Rastafarians to use pot (though not import it, evidently)
-Santería religions to perform animal sacrifices.
The federal law was found to not protect a church from designation as part of a historical district that prevented it from making an addition because the court held that the federal law could not apply to the states. Therefore, states began passing the laws so that churches would be protected from such restrictions.
Why is this law a bad thing? If I were LBGT I would like to know what businesses did or did not support my lifestyle and maybe choose my shopping based on that knowledge.
And if you live in a small town with only one flower shop, one bakery, two barbers, one hardware store, two grocery stores, etc, and you are flamboyantly gay and in addition to being small the town is also predominantly religious?
Then I would assume it would be a lot easier to know which places were friendly towards LBGT. Or there may be reasons to want to leave such a small town.
Again, why is this law a bad thing? Don’t private businesses have the right to turn away customers anyway?
I’m not trying to stir the pot, as a straight male maybe I am not seeing the entire picture. As a Native Alaskan if I go into a business and get treated like shit, for any reason, I don’t go back.
I’d rather just get my shopping done with and get to exist in the same normal life that everyone else gets, thanks. You go place basic parts of living in society off-limits because of segregationists if you want, but I’d rather just exist.
This is factually incorrect. The law prevents the state government from passing other laws that burden religious exercise. On the federal side, this happened in the Hobby Lobby case: the government sought to compel a business to pay for contraceptives to which the business objected for religious reasons. The federal RFRA protected the business.
The federal RFRA does not apply to the states, or bind state governments.
It purports to, yes. But the Supreme Court ruled, in a case styled City of Bourne v. Flores, that while Congress had the obvious power to pass laws that bind the federal government, the Constitution did not give Congress the power to bind the states in this area. Subsequent to that decision, states began passing their own versions of the RFRA.
That letter is an advocacy piece, not a neutral analysis of the law.
For example, one supposed “difference” is that the list of entities protected under the Indiana law is much broader than “currently recognized under federal law.”
But that’s not strictly true. Federal law is precisely the same as Indiana law in this respect. The Dictionary Act provides that “person” includes all sorts of things, including “corporations,” and the federal RFRA protects “persons.”
Why did they say it like that? Because the Hobby Lobby case involved a closely-held corporation and the Supreme Court limited its upholding of the RFRA in that case to closely-held corporations. What they’re saying is, in effect, “Well, the Supreme Court hasn’t upheld the federal law’s identically broad reach of covered entities.”
Yet.
But the plain language of the total federal law is the same as the plain language of the Indiana law.
So a legislature can pass a law that prohibits itself from passing other laws?
This leads to another question: Let’s say a given political party loses control of the legislature to a different party in an election. Can the last act of the old legislature be to prohibit the next legislature from passing laws that the outgoing legislature doesn’t agree with?
But the plain language of the law is not the only factor, as has been pointed out in this thread over and over again, but you fail to mention this. Care to mention why?
Just to be clear, since the law is based on federal law, the courts will view religious challenges to laws the same way they do now at the federal level. So businesses will not actually be able to turn away gay customers.
So unless there’s already an epidemic of businesses turning away gay customers and then winning in court, there’s not going to be such a problem under Indiana’s, or the 20 other states that have such laws. Meanwhile, the laws allow people to smoke peyote. They can even exclude gays from their religious peyote ceremonies!
The businesses that will have a right to discriminate will be those that already have either a legal right to discriminate, or an effective right to discriminate due to difficulty of enforcement. So cabbies will still not be picking up black people, and Christian wedding planners will still not be doing gay weddings.
Discrimination is more than turning away customers. It’s not that black and white. Discrimination is waiting on the gay customers last. Discrimination is giving active churchgoers a discount that no one else gets. Discrimination is taking Muslims’ money but being rude and unhelpful. Discrimination is following a black customer around the store as if he were a thief, just because he’s black.
All of these practices go on anyway, of course, and the legal standard of proof is hard to meet. It’s just that in general, the law discourages them, and therefore society at large discourages them, even if the individual minority gets rather mixed messages about that. What I find disturbing is the clear message from the Indiana government that some people’s identity, as religious people, allows them license to discriminate. Honestly, I would think it’s more worrisome for Jews and Muslims, as religious minorities (who are often also ethnic minorities), than for Indiana gays.
Private businesses can turn away customers as long as it’s not due to a prohibited reason (illegal discrimination). Different jurisdictions prohibit discrimination based on different characteristics. The issue with this law,as I understand it, is not so much that it would allow discrimination based on sexual orientation in Indiana ( it currently is permitted under Indiana law) but rather that it would essentially prevent cities from prohibiting such discrimination - and perhaps also allow people a defense when accused of discrimination based on race or religion, although practically speaking I don’t think courts would allow that. http://wane.com/2015/03/30/attorney-rfra-trumps-citys-anti-discrimination-law/