Deploying Religious Liberty as a Weapon of Mass Discrimination

Again with the Religious Liberty as a weapon of mass discrimination thing! Whether the debate has been about achieving marriage equality or preventing employment discrimination or providing gender affirming care or protecting reproductive freedom it seems that someone, somewhere is absolutely convinced that their religious liberty is under attack because not everyone agrees with them. It is, of course, not a new phenomenon. It has been going on at least since Pat Robertson launched the Culture Wars with the speech that drove me out of the Republican Party in 1992. But I digress.

The reason religious liberty is back on the top of the news cycle is, of course, the recent Supreme Court decision siding with the Colorado woman who filed suit to protect herself from having to offer the same services to same-sex couples that she offers to opposite-sex couples in her website business.

Although not unexpected given the make-up of the current Court, it was a chilling harbinger of things to come as we watch before our very eyes the ongoing erosion of equal protection allegedly guaranteed all Americans. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion, “Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

And because this ruling comes with the double whammy of allegedly protecting the religious liberty of some by eroding equal protection for all, I’m reminded of these words from our former President of the House of Deputies Gay Jennings who wrote: “Religious liberty is a bedrock of our country and a right cherished by Americans of many faiths. But disguising homophobia as religious freedom … is not only a dangerous legal precedent, it is a gross distortion of the teachings of Jesus.”

So one more time with the refresher course: The First Amendment protects us from any laws “impeding the free exercise of religion” thus guaranteeing that each and every American has the liberty to believe — or not believe — absolutely anything he, she or they choose about what God wills or intends, blesses or condemns. It also — up until now — has protected the rest of us from any other American imposing those beliefs on us.

In short: Religious liberty is NOT the liberty to impose your religion on everybody else.

For example: A Jew has the religious liberty to keep a kosher kitchen — but not to take away your ham sandwich. A pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic had the religious liberty to abstain from meat on Friday — but not to confiscate my pot roast. And an Evangelical Christian has the right to believe that God doesn’t bless same-sex marriages - but not to deny equal protection to the marriage of the lesbian couple next door.

The First Amendment is doing its job protecting our religious liberty. And anybody who tells you otherwise needs to do a little remedial reading of the Ninth Commandment. (I'll save you having to look it up: that's the "shall not bear false witness" one.)

Bottom line: The equal protection guaranteed all Americans by the Constitution is not equal protection unless it protects all Americans equally. And we cannot rest until it does.

So buckle up, friends … there’s work to do to end this annual SCOTUS Watch ritual where we wait one more time to see if our full humanity and citizenship will be affirmed or diminished by the ongoing efforts to chip away at those rights by using religion as a smoke-screen for homo/transphobic bigotry. And there are miles to go before we live in a nation where liberty and justice has become not just a pledge we make but a reality we live. La lucha continua!