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Saturday, May 11, 2013

First Amendment, Schmirst Amendment

A gesture of honoring God at a high school track meet disqualified the winning team. Not allowed.

When Obamacare was introduced, the Catholic Church protested. It would violate their religious convictions. The government agreed that the church wouldn't have to pay for contraceptives ... but the same protection didn't extend to Catholic universities, organizations, or hospitals.

When the legal playing field shifted and demanded that homosexual couples be allowed to adopt, the Catholic adoption agencies refused. The courts denied their suit and their only options were to either change their convictions or close their doors. They closed their doors.

In California, the people voted in Prop 8 as an affirmation that marriage was defined as the union of a man and a woman. Taken back to court, Prop 8 was overturned largely because "some who favored it did so from religious conviction".

A baker in Oregon was castigated for refusing on religious grounds to bake a wedding cake for two women. Now in Richland, Washington, a florist is sued for not selling flowers for a wedding to two men because she believed "biblically that marriage is between a man and a woman." In 2005 an innkeeper in Vermont was sued and lost for refusing to host a homosexual wedding and in 2006 a New Mexico photographer opted not to shoot a homosexual "commitment ceremony" and, literally, paid the price. A recent story out of Hawaii came out the same, with the owner of a bed and breakfast losing a suit for refusing on religious grounds to rent a single bed to a lesbian couple.

The florist wasn't, as it turns out, sued first by the men she refused to sell to. She was sued by the Washington Attorney General for violating the state's anti-discrimination law. The ACLU followed suit (little joke there) and filed for a public apology, a demand to change her policy, and a $5,000 contribution to a local LGBT youth center. Get that? Have convictions, stand for them, and expect to have them violated repeatedly.

Delaware's new bill that redefines marriage includes "protection for religious groups" ... but not for others of religious conviction. Ministers can choose not to serve a particular segment based on their convictions, but wedding vendors such as photographers, florists, bakers, etc. do not have the same protection. Neither does the Clerk of the Peace.

What is in common with all these stories? Yes, there is a whole lot of "look what 'gay marriage' is doing to religious freedom", but that isn't in all of these cases. Yes, it does look like religious persecution is starting in America, but it's a little hard to support the term "persecution" when it is so spotty and rare. What, then? The common element is religious convictions in the public square. Obama, for instance, allowed the Roman Catholic Church an exemption for contraceptives because the Roman Catholic Church is, well, a church. Their subsidiaries, their services, their other programs? Not protected. Neither are private citizens who own businesses such as Hobby Lobby. That is "the public square" and religious persuasion in the public square will not be countenanced. You are free to believe what you want in private; just don't exercise your religious convictions in public. That includes sports announcers, Christian track members, florists, bakers, or even voters. You still have your First Amendment right to your religious views, but only as long as they are private and don't affect anything or anyone in public. (And if your religious views require that they affect your public life, well, too bad. That one is right out, too.)

8 comments:

David said...

As we've seen with the gun control debate, the Bill of Rights is under attack. The notion being that the Bill of Rights was penned 200 years ago. Since it is so old it doesn't align with what we know today. We're smarter and better than we were 200 years ago.

Unfortunately, I don't see any way to turn this tide. Starting from the view that humans are merely animals with no intrinsic value, continued through with the dissolving of the sanctity of marriage, alighting on the sanctity of sex, we arrive where we are now, and those of us that believe in objective morality are up a creek without a paddle. Obviously no amount of Biblical or rational arguing is going to counter the emotional argument of "Marry who you love". I mean, how heartless must you be to not let people express their love? This battle was lost long ago, we're merely in our death throes.

Stan said...

The scope of the attack on Christianity in the form of an attack on religious freedom (I call it an attack on Christianity because I don't hear, in the public arena, anyone calling for the outlawing or removal of Islam or Buddhism or any other religion.) is much larger than we realize. In the '50's William F. Buckley Jr. warned about the turn of Yale (originally founded to train clergy) against Christianity. The move continued in other universities (often founded as Christian institutions) like Princeton and Harvard. "Scholars" published works that convinced the academic world that Christianity was a product of a power hungry few aiming to suppress diversity and control through spiritual power. The arguments are weak, but that doesn't matter. If the book is opposed to Christianity, regardless of its defensibility, it is accurate and noteworthy.

Then the Supreme Court ruled against Bob Jones University because they had (admittedly questionable) policies that discriminated. It was/is a religious university, but the Supreme Court held that it didn't have 1st Amendment religious protections. Notre Dame got the same treatment over the issue of contraception. "You're a university; you have no rights to have a view."

Now people like Chai Feldblum, Obama's appointee to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, are candidly admitting that "I'm having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious freedom should win" when pitted against gay rights. Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago is arguing that religious belief should not be protected on the basis of "equal protection". "Why should Baptists be protected but not Peter Singer?" (who believes that killing babies -- live ones up to the age of 3 -- and disabled people is perfectly acceptable and coined the term "speciesism" for people that think that humans have special value). With the rise of the "Nones" (those who are "spiritual" but do not claim any specific belief or religion ... or any specific spirituality for that matter), we are already almost standing on the outside looking in.

It has been some time coming, and now the tide is about to break on the beach. I don't expect to retain my First Amendment rights to the Freedom of Religion much longer. Nor do I anticipate that my "liberal Christian" friends will put out much effort to defend my rights. I don't expect this to get better before it gets much worse.

Marshal Art said...

The usual suspects regard all this as discrimination only. One's religious convictions must be put aside due to the belief that the state (the people) have granted businesses a license in order to serve all of the public without regard to what group one might belong. If homosexuals want you to cater their wedding, you have no right to refuse if you cater other weddings. That would be discrimination of a type that they wrongly equate to racism or sexism.

Stan said...

I wonder when the "usual suspects" are going to file a lawsuit against discrimination against those without shoes and shirts ("No shoes, no shirt, no service") or maybe even a sexual discrimination at the YMCA for only housing M's (men)?

In fact, how is it that, say, a photographer cannot discriminate against, say, a same-sex couple who wishes to have their pictures taken but can discriminate against a heterosexual couple that asks for flowers. (After all, if the photographer doesn't have the right to determine who he/she can serve, why would he/she have the right to determine what he/she can serve?)

Now, I know that's all pretty silly, but no more silly than their argument, and in this case it is a matter of Constitutional protection. Yeah, that's not going to carry much weight. (I understand they've started a new TV series that explores whether or not we should discard the Constitution entirely because it doesn't work anymore. Oh, yeah, it's coming.)

Bubba said...

Marshall, you shouldn't talk about other people at blogs that aren't their own. We all know that's gossip, and gossip is wrong.

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The idea is an interesting one, that in order to serve the public by running a business, you must ask the public for a license granting you permission to serve, and through that license the public can dictate the terms of your service, how you may and may not serve.

The concept invokes "the public" to conflate two entities, the actual society that a business seeks to serve and that society's government. With the exception of government contracts, where the government has a much more obvious authority to place limits on contractors, the business seeks to serve society, but the argument is that the government has the authority to restrict that service on society's behalf.

It's easy to see the influence of Rousseau's concept of the "General Will" here, the state representing the people in all things, and there are numerous (other) problems with the concept.

1) The concept is not necessary, as it's clear to everyone that a truly free society already provides a mechanism that regulates business practices: the market forces of supply and demand exact a cost for wildly unpopular actions. If "the public" really was so opposed to a particular business practice, it would avoid that business to the degree that it could not survive as a profitable enterprise.

2) The concept is not what we find in history unless one mistakenly invokes royal charters as if they were used for all businesses. They were given out only for specific enterprises -- often risky, large-scale endeavors that needed special protections from the government and obtained such protections because their work would directly benefit the government and its empire. You didn't need a royal charter to open a pub, which is short for "public house."

3) The line between businesses and consumers remains arbitrarily drawn, at best. Businesses provide goods and services, but so do individuals; why wouldn't an individual need a business license to offer his goods in a yard sale or offer his services in the labor market? Is one's resume on Monster somehow not a public listing of the services you're making available?

4) The concept doesn't address the central issue. Even if the government has the authority to issue business licenses, it doesn't follow that it SHOULD restrict licenses in this way. One can make the argument that most issues that business licenses address can be handled through the civil justice system, but even if health safety for large-scale food-related businesses is sensible, those sort of licenses don't inherently justify further interference with the market.

One can argue that such interference is justified because declining a potential business arrangement for prejudicial reasons causes harm, but surely the reasons don't determine harm: if I don't serve you because I'm out of stock or because you're breaking the no-shirt-no-shoes-no-service rule, you're harmed just as much as if I don't serve you because of your race. And, harm swings both ways, as consumers can cause harm by refusing to patronize a business; the concept of a boycott depends on the ability to cause harm.

One can argue these restrictions protect minorities, but I'd argue they do so at the expense of other minorities: minority consumers are empowered to require service from literally every business on the market, but minority business owners are prohibited from operating their businesses in ways that are contrary to the ruling elite.

One can assert that businesses and their owners are separate legal entities, but surely they are not wholly independent entities. Ownership implies the right to dispose of that property as he sees fit, and the less say that a person has over the business he owns, the less it can be truly said that he is its owner.

Bubba said...

I'd say that it's clear that some people really are radical statists, radical in their desire to see traditional institutions coopted or destroyed, and statist in their willingness to use the coercive force of government to accomplish that goal.

Some people just cannot stand the belief that God made us male and female so that a man would become one flesh with his wife, and they cannot tolerate the possibility that somewhere two consenting adults are engaging in commerce without close supervision by Leviathan. The very idea of people using biblical morality to navigate a truly free market is doubly offensive to them.

They generally don't worry about the possibility of Christian persecution because these theological and political radicals' true faith is leftism. The inconsistent and insubstantial references to Christianity are purely cosmetic, and they don't worry about their own faith being suppressed because those who advocate strong central control usually conceive the controllers as Good People Just Like Them.

When they find out they're wrong, they rarely have the power to do anything about it.

Just as Gregory Hicks. Ask Mark Steyn points out, the Benghazi whistle-blower voted for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He's as much a Democrat as the people running the administration, "The only difference is that for Mr Hicks four dead colleagues trumps party."

(Funny how the moralists on the left care so little for the deliberate lies and cover-ups about only the seventh or eighth American ambassador murdered in our entire history, the overt political intimidation through the IRS, and a mass-murdering abortionist whose crimes were overlooked by a systematically lax regulatory regime. Maybe the beuracrats issuing business licenses should focus less on whether gays get their wedding cakes and more on whether newborns are being murdered en masse.)

For myself, I think there's a stronger ethical case for declining certain events rather than clientele: I can understand not putting two men on a "wedding" cake more than I can declining to bake a non-descript birthday cake for a man who happened to be gay. The reality is that declining events occur more often than clients, but the Left focuses on clients rather than events because of the emotional response to the idea that that baker doesn't serve "his kind."

And they focus on the baker far more than the track team or the adoption agency because they want to win the argument on the easiest cases but apply that victory to the hard cases.

(And we've seen the Left argue that even truly public resources -- government-owned property -- should exclude events that the Left doesn't like, such as events held by the Boy Scouts, and I have no doubt that some who claim to work for all kinds of clients would draw their own lines somewhere, probably including events for the NRA.)

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My own position is that there should be wide latitude about what is legal even though many otherwise legal actions aren't moral. Harm should be defined pretty strictly to things like fraud, theft, assault, and murder.

I wouldn't draw the same line as others do in running my own business, but there is room to disagree, both on eating meat sacrificed to idols and on operating a business. And we ARE taught that we cannot serve God and mammon, so profit motive is no good reason to act against your own conscience.

Stan said...

Elegantly put, Bubba.

Marshal Art said...

Bubba,

I am crushed and broken by the corrective weight of my shame.