As numerous posts on this blog have previously pointed out, no element of society is more self-centered or inclined to believe itself above the law than the "godly Christian" crowd. It's all about them 24/7 and they hold nothing but contempt for the rights - in some instances, the very lives - of others. Meanness and selfishness and hypocrisy are their principal characteristics. And when others stand up to the Christofascist effort to ride rough shod over everyone else, these modern day Pharisees have the gall to claim that they are the ones being persecuted. With last month's losses at the Supreme Court on gay marriage and a recognition that demographics are increasingly against them, it can be expected that the claims of persecution and efforts to use claims of "religious freedom" will escalate further. A piece in Think Progress looks at the coming disingenuous propaganda campaign. Here are highlights:
Religious conservatives, however, still have one more card to play in their efforts to deny equal rights to LGBT Americans. As the socially conservative writer Ross Douthat suggested shortly after the Court struck DOMA, the best way to continue to limit the rights of gay people is to “build in as many protections for religious liberty as possible along the way.”
It’s clear that anti-gay leaders are already executing this contingency plan. Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint claimed on Tuesday that marriage equality “means trampling First Amendment religious liberty protections along the way.” At least fifteen anti-gay individuals, ranging from wedding cake bakers to bed and breakfast owners to t-shirt makers, have claimed the right to discriminate against gay people — often in direct violation of the law — with many citing their religious beliefs as justification. The conservative U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops claimed in a brief they filed in the Supreme Court that treating anti-gay discrimination permissively “protects the religious liberty of those employers with a religious objection to providing” health coverage to same-sex partners.
This, simply put, is the social conservative end game. They are not going to succeed in blocking marriage equality. But if they can exempt the very people who are most likely to engage in invidious discrimination against gay people from laws prohibiting such discrimination, then they can suck the life out of many pro-gay laws. Their exaggerated view of “religious liberty” can no more be squared with equality than it could when Bob Jones University claimed a similar religious right to engage in race discrimination.
Ultimately, social conservatives’ efforts to expand religious rights to the point where they devour other essential freedoms such as the right to be free from discrimination are likely to backfire. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court developed a workable framework for religious liberty. Such liberty is robust, but it does not include the right to engage in invidious discrimination, and it does not give businesses a right to “impose the employer’s religious faith on the employees.” Then, in 1990, Justice Scalia blew up this framework with his majority opinion in Employment Div. v. Smith. Smith shrunk religious liberty far more than many Americans were willing to tolerate; Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) to restore the religious liberties lost in Smith almost unanimously, and it was signed into law by President Clinton.
Now, however, religious conservatives want to go far beyond the 1980s framework that RFRA restored. They claim both the right to defy anti-discrimination law and the right to ignore the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Lee, which held that “[w]hen followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.” Religious liberties are rightfully enshrined in our Constitution, but they have not been understood as a sweeping right to deny equally important liberties to others. If religious conservatives insist upon the right to do so, the consensus that led to RFRA’s passage is likely to break down, and people of faith could ultimately wind up with fewer protections than they enjoyed before a small number of religious conservatives decided to overreach.
The task before the LGBT community is to educate the larger public on this fraudulent approach of the Christofascists and make it clear that this twisting of the concept of "religious freedom" ultimately will threaten the rights of many other in addition to LGBT citizens.
