Religious Freedom and Homosexuality

Indiana has taken a huge amount of heat over its attempt to enact its own Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Similar to what happened here in Arizona, people started yelling discrimination, often without any respect for religious liberties.

Those who support the laws will quickly say the law is about religious freedom and not about discrimination. Those who oppose the law say it is veiled language to allow for discrimination against homosexuals. In Indiana the governor asked for additional legislation to clarify this point and to prevent the law being misused.

A similar situation in Arkansas makes a curious side note. The governor there said he changed his mind at the last minute and vetoed the law because his teenage son asked him to. If I was a voter in Arkansas I would ask the governor to explain why his son is more qualified to govern than he is.

In discussing the topic, I have heard it said that church leaders should have no say in these policies because it doesn’t affect them. They are given a ministerial exception in the laws. This argument is silly, creating an inequality between church leaders and church members. In my church I would like the membership and leadership to have the same religious freedoms. It is also obvious that their exception will soon be taken away.

A lot of this hoopla is based on a denial of reality. Conservatives want to protect religious freedoms, and try to pass RFRA or similar laws. But at the same time they try to align themselves as being against any form of discrimination. But the truth is you cannot have it both ways.

Religious freedom must include allowing a person to choose not to participate in something they find morally objectionable, not only as a private person, but also as a businessperson. Asking them to set aside their beliefs while conducting business is asking them to be a hypocrite. Incidentally I believe this should hold true for personal ideologies as much as for recognized religious perspectives.

Meanwhile the homosexual feels discriminated against if a businessperson does not want to serve them. They have very successful political forces seeking to make any such decision illegal. They have also controlled the dialogue of these encounters labeling anyone opposed to homosexuality as homophobes, defining in the public mind that homosexuality is genetic condition instead of a behavior, and defining sexual behavior as a greater good than religious freedom.

The path we are on ends with the courts ruling that all major world religions are historically wrong in regard to this issue and must change their doctrine. I don’t know for sure what the future holds, but I can tell you one thing about religious freedom. You will miss it when it is gone. Even if you are not religious, you will not like the world where the government determines the content of your conscience.

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Right of Refusal

The right of refusal is the legal ability to refuse to do something which has been requested of you. When a child is told by their parents to go to bed at their appointed bed time, they have no right of refusal. When a military man is commanded by a ranking officer to do his duty, he also has no right of refusal.

When a businessman is asked by a customer to do something he finds offensive, does he have a right of refusal? The most common assumption might be that, yes, he can refuse to do something he finds offensive. But this is not very clear in America today. 

Every person on the planet has a sense of right and wrong. I am not saying everyone’s opinions agree, but every person has an opinion. If a customer asks a shop owner to do something that violates their own personal moral code, whatever that may be, do they have the right of refusal?  Should they have the right of refusal?

Phrasing the question this way I assume most of you are saying, yes, they should. But understand this. When a person is refused there is someone on the other side of the counter who may have some question as to whether they are being treated fairly. Perhaps the shop owner is harboring some prejudice against the type of person that customer is. Maybe that customer is being discriminated against. It feels like the word maybe is killing us.

Let’s pick a few examples:

1. A man goes to a kosher Jewish deli, and asks them to put bacon on his sandwich.
2. A woman goes to a gay printer, and demands he prints fliers stating homosexuality is sin.
3. A baker is asked to bake a wedding cake which is all angel food, he thinks the idea is tacky.
4. An Islamic man is asked to make a custom ring which has a Star of David on it.
5. A Christian photographer is asked to shoot a gay wedding, even though he believes it defies the sanctity of marriage.

Do any of these business owners have the right of refusal?  Should they have the right?

Number three is different than the others because it is about personal taste, but the other four are about religious freedom. The question of the day is, when religious freedom encounters the right to be served, which gets the higher priority?

If you answer the same for all four, then congratulations you are consistent. If you said all of them have the right to refusal you chose religious freedom as the higher value. If you said none of them have the right of refusal, then you avoiding all possibility discrimination is more important than religious freedom.

But if you answered 1, 2, 4 and 5 inconsistently, then perhaps you are caught in the trap of discrimination. Namely that some groups deserve rights and privileges others do not have. What you chose reveals either, who you favor, who you disfavor or a combination of both.

Rights in Conflict

The local news this morning is raising a fuss about a new bill in Arizona awaiting the Governor’s decision whether to sign it or veto it. Arizona’s SB1062 as endorsed by the Center for Arizona Policy is an attempt to restore religious freedom in certain cases. You can learn more about the law, and its intents by following the link. But perhaps more importantly you can see a history of how two different rights have come to be in conflict with each other since 1990.

Now I started off by saying they were raising a fuss. I use this term because at no point did they try to explain what the bill will do, or what the specific wording of the bill was. Other stations might have done so, but I would feel better about the press if they had led with this information. Instead they almost exclusively spoke of the possible economic impact. Bad policy is made when all we care about is whether or not it makes money. We should always care more about the right and wrong of issues than its economic impact.

SB1062 is an example of how different rights have come into conflict with each other in America. The trend is religious freedom is losing importance in America. When rights come in conflict with each other it is now the likely loser. Our heritage of religious freedom and diversity is disappearing fast because we are demanding that the individual conscience conform to cultural norms.