No, it does not create a nihilist context. It clearly says religious freedom is not carte blanche to do whatever you want.
Religion has the same freedoms as individuals. Are you suggesting that being a bigot become illegal.
Good thing we’re not saying that religious freedom gives you carte blanche. Strawman alert!
If your religion says you shouldn’t work on Mondays, you don’t have to work on Mondays. That doesn’t mean an employer who needs you to come in on Monday has to hire you. It doesn’t matter how long-standing your “no Mondays” policy is. You could have it written down in a 3000 year old book, or you could make it up Sunday evening. Doesn’t matter. If you don’t wanna work on Monday nobody can make you. And if your employer doesn’t want to employ someone who doesn’t wanna work on Monday, nobody can make him, either.
I’m suggesting that the religious may not ignore the law when it has been declared constitutional by the relevant courts. Piety does not confer sovereign citizen status.
They can terminate you though. Limiting “Nobody can make you” to involuntary servitude enforced by corporal punishment strains the concept beyond any utility. Practicing a religion can have negative consequences, and there is nothing the believer can do to stop that.
Yes, of course they can fire you. Just because your religion says you don’t work mondays doesn’t obligate me to hire you to work on mondays and then have you not work on mondays. That’s exactly what I said.
They can’t fire you simply because of your religion, but they can certainly fire you if you refuse to do your job and cite your religious beliefs.
Of course the employer has to be a bit careful, if you create a work rule that has no bona fide purpose and serves to discriminate against certain religions, then you might get sued if you fire someone who doesn’t want to conform to your work rule. If you own a pork processing plant and you require workers to handle dead pigs, that’s a bona fide job requirement and Jews and Muslims who don’t want to handle dead pigs don’t have to work there. Likewise a restaurant that serves pork, or beef, or meat, it’s fine that your religion is against eating or touching the dead animals but that doesn’t mean the BBQ joint has to keep paying the Wiccan waitress who refuses to serve customers dead animals.
On the other hand, if you’ve got a regular office where employees tap on computers all day, and you decide to require all your employees to eat pork every day before work, a judge just might agree that you only instituted that rule because you don’t want to employ Jews and Muslims.
All this is irrelevant though. If my church that I started five minutes ago doesn’t want to marry gay people, or black people, or the elderly, or the disabled, or veterans, then we don’t have to. It doesn’t matter that I just made up those rules five minutes ago and they aren’t written down in any book anywhere, you still can’t make us.
You can COMPLAIN about us, and tell everyone we’re assholes for not allowing the disabled to get married, but you still can’t force us to allow veterans marry the elderly. And if a black guy marries an elderly veteran, and we kick him out of our stupid club for losers because of that, then there’s nothing you can do about that either, except complain. Them’s the breaks. The government isn’t going to step in and force us to do anything.
So long as all the relationships are among adult believers not involved in commerce with the public, I have no problem, so long as their practices are otherwise within the law. Marrying underage children comes to mind. The government will stop that, not matter which being commands it.
OK, but that seems to be avoiding the cutting edge issues in favor of more clear-cut ones.
Suppose your church believes that homosexual activity is immoral and so refuses to hire any openly gay people? Or has a very restrictive view on what roles women can perform?
So what? It’s a private organization. They can discriminate at will.
Where it gets tricky is when they start operating hospitals or otherwise cross over into the for-profit world.
So a religion can refuse to perform inter-racial marriages? Doesn’t that make God a bigot?
Great, now that we’ve gotten that cleared up, since individuals are permitted to discriminate, do you agree that churches are permitted to discriminate?
Only if you believe that religions who refuse to perform interracial marriages truly represent God.
I don’t think anyone is disagreeing with you on this.
It’s been downhill for God ever since he chose the Jews for their special status.
I seem to detect some thread drift here. ISTM the OP question/challenge takes as starting point that we consider it a given that a regular commercial business/public service provider should not pull the “religion card” to avoid engaging with people of the “wrong” race/sex/gender identity/ethnicity/prescribed medical procedure, and “religious freedom protection laws” are bogus (they are). And the question is why should this not apply to the religious institutions themselves while engaging in the actual religious activity. Thus the example/contrast given: we are all over on the case of a baker who refuses to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, but not so over whole churches that will not perform the rite to begin with.
Many of us answer: one is an act of public commerce, the other is a sacramental act. Similarly, IMO judges and clerks have a legal mandate to issue marriage documents to citizens that fulfill the requirements under civil statute and case law, without inserting their personal beliefs, or else they are dereclict in their duty; clergy OTOH are not under such a legal mandate, they are not public servants nor a business in the open market.
My position is that the religion exceptions should apply narrowly to the religious activity as such. The denomination/congregation can observe their doctrinal discrimination within the congregation’s operation, but must not engage in shell ownership of businesses in the open market with intent to play the “religion card” when faced with compliance with secular laws and regulations.
First question: Affirmative. Second Question: Not necessarily, if only because every Tom, Dick and Fred Phelps can claim God spoke unto him anything and how do we prove otherwise? But you and I can then picket them and call *them *bigots, *especially *if they seek to enforce that rule upon the rest of society.
Not in the marketplace. What they do in the church is their business.
Let’s make this easy. Those Christian bakers. That Christian wedding photographer. Should they have to make the cake/shoot the wedding for the gay couples who wanted to buy their services? My contention is that they can have whatever private beliefs they want, but when they open a place of business, they follow the rules like everyone else. Doesn’t matter if they think their god tells them gays can’t get married, they should either sell that couple the cake, or photograph the wedding, or get out of the business. Their personal beliefs does not give them any protection on how a customer is treated. This is my view for any public business with religious owners. If you’re running a pharmacy and someone wants RU-486, then you sell it to them, no matter what you personally think
Bolding mine. What does Obama have to do with anything? All of the cases I’ve read about regarding bakers/photographers and gay weddings have been under state or local ordinances.
Do you have a cite that the Federal government is involved, at all?
If you want to force churches to not discriminate, then you get rid of the free exercise of religion clause and then probably require churches to be licensed by the state. Alternatively, if you want to get rid of the section of the CRA that says business can’t discriminate, you either strike down that law, or you amend the constitution along the lines of “free exercise of commerce” clause, modeled after the free exercise of religion clause.
The OP had nothing to do with religious people attempting to bring their beliefs into the workplace. It was specifically about the Church itself discriminating. I see no posts were those advocating that a Church is legally allowed to discriminate also believe that its members should be legally allowed to discriminate in their respective workplaces.
This debate is about nothing.
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