My Thoughts on Religious Freedom Bills
I'm going to put aside my moral outrage at such bills, put aside my personal feelings about such a bill...and address purely my legal concern about such a bill: If a person (business) desires a religious exemption from a law, or desires to claim a "sincerely held religious belief" to be exempt from a law...than surely, there must also be a test to ensure that it is in fact a tenant of your faith. Why might you ask? Well, the most obvious problem is...how can you assure it is truly a tenant of a deeply held religious conviction, or just an excuse to discriminate and avoid repercussion? Let me purpose a scenario for your consideration. (For the record, I am gay.) Let us say, that I am a Christian, who runs a bakery. I advertise my business services to the general public, including the baking of wedding cakes. Now, let us suppose that a Customer comes in, asking for a cake featuring two men, as a wedding cake. This makes me uncomfortable, so I say that as a Christian, it violates my deeply held, sincere religious beliefs, because I believe homosexuality is immoral and a sin. So, now I am a judge and the business owner has been sued, I face a conundrum. Not all Christians hold that homosexuality is immoral and a sin. So surely, it cannot be a core, uncompromising tenant of your faith. So then it must be specific to your denomination. The problem with that, is that denominations are created by man, and are therefore not holy tenants, and merely one interpretation of the overall faith which you are claiming baking this cake violates. If you are willing to subjugate yourself to man made interpretation, I cannot find you should be exempted from the law. Especially as you stand to profit (which is the primary purpose of a for profit business) and it does not place any substantial burden on the practice of your individual faith. The argument than becomes "Well, the bible claims that homosexuality is a sin and immoral" Which it does. But now I am left with TWO dilemmas. The first is that, if you are going to abide by that tenant, a literal interpretation of the bible, I must now ask you if you will also refuse service to those who wear blended clothing, eat shellfish, have disobeyed their parents, trimmed their hair, not banished a woman to the desert, who do not believe Jesus in the lord and savior and other such acts defined as immoral by your claimed holy book. I than see that if you are willing to compromise for these things, than there is no reason you should be allowed to not compromise in baking the cake for what is presumably a gay wedding. That also demonstrates that it must not be as sincerely held a religious belief as you claim. So now, let's replace that with me being a Pagan, refusing Christians Service, because Christians have prosecuted and burned Pagans at the stake, and serving them violates my sincerely held religious belief not to help those who are guilty of such atrocities. As a Christian, you would be furious...mad...how dare I?
