“Of Course Gay Marriage Won’t Impinge On Religious Freedom!”
By Mitch Berg
That’s what they told us.
“You cant possibly know that”, some of us – even some of us who pretty much gave up opposing gay marriage, save in our personal lives, responded.
Who was right?
Oh, if you read and absorb this blog, you already know the answer, don’t you?
June 7th, 2017 at 11:24 am
Now the question is whether Obergefell v. Hodges then could be reversed on First Amendment grounds.
June 7th, 2017 at 11:35 am
Happy this decent family is fighting back against the debauched reprobates running East Lansing. Is there a Go Fund It campaign to help them? Of course not. Defending American values and constitutional rights violates the GFI rules…unless it benefits reprobates of course.
June 7th, 2017 at 7:03 pm
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June 7th, 2017 at 10:29 pm
Word choice is important. The proper response to a claim that SSM won’t impinge on religious freedom is to ask if it will conflict with religious freedom. Clearly it will. Some would say that it was intended to do so.
June 8th, 2017 at 10:30 am
Mitch (and commenters), please tell me which church is being forced to perform marriages they do not want to perform?
Please tell me why you think “property rights” (not religious freedom), trumps civil liberty, e.g. why it is a shopkeeper should be allowed to deny service to a black man or woman, this is the same issue as you’ve raised here, though you call it religious freedom, that’s not what it is, this is about doing business – or “forced” to do so, in your words, with a protected class and claiming it’s about religious freedom. It isn’t, no one is being compelled to perform or attend a marriage ceremony they oppose. This is a property rights issue and I think you know it.
June 8th, 2017 at 10:46 am
Having now read the story (a FoxNews opinion piece which doubtless left out some key elements – I’m sure that’s not biased at all), and remain convinced this is a property rights issue. The family is NOT performing the marriage, they are allowing the conduct of business on their property and have discriminated against a protected class. The city cannot act against their conduct on their property (it’s not in the city) so the city took the action it felt compelled to take, to ban a discriminatory business from conducting business. Put differently, were they to deny food to gays at the farmers market, they’d be doing the same thing. Gays are a protected class. You don’t like it, clearly, and you’re using the red-herring of religious liberty, to argue people are allowed to refrain from doing business from that protected class despite state (or local) protections for that class. Should the city enforce action based on acts done outside it’s jurisdiction? Well, I’d be open to that debate and think it’s going too far, but were this done in the city limits, I’d say they were ENTIRELY right to do so and that’s the main point here isn’t it? Are gays going to be protected against discrimination or is religious freedom going to be used as a BS argument to allow for discrimination in business practice. In this case the local government wants to define gays as protected, and you small government folks want to override that decision with a big government hand to say they aren’t allowed to protect those civil liberties. I’d be happy to say the city overreached by concerning itself with conduct outside it’s jurisdiction but that’s not really the issue anyway.
June 9th, 2017 at 8:51 am
Pen, if I don’t have the right to use my property as I see fit, how exactly would we argue that my religious rights are not infringed? The upkeep of my church depends, really, on donations from guys like me, and quite frankly, there are a LOT of jobs that I simply won’t consider for religious reasons. Now if a baker or florist is required to do things he doesn’t want to do because the “civil rights” of homosexual trump his property rights, how long is it before my objections to taking some of those jobs are overruled?