At some point I get tired of the raw hostility surrounding my beliefs on this on this site and have other things to do so I'm sorry I haven't adequately addressed all your points before. I recognize you think I am some sort of a bigot because I've been a consistent defender of freedom of conscience and religion on myriad issues as they relate to a wide variety of spiritual and humanistic traditions. That's fine if it makes you feel important or whatever. So, can we dispense with the argumenta ad hominem?
It is rather important to me, because your "opinion" and defense of the provisions of and motive behind laws like Indiana's RFRA kinda, y'know, disrespects my existence? As well as the existence and rights of millions of people?
If that was actually what the Indiana RFRA law was, no one would have a problem with it. But the Indiana RFRA law contained two passages that specifically went beyond what the federal law and 19 other state laws contained, by extending corporate personhood to pretty much all business entities and extending the "religious freedom" defense to civil suits, in addition to three of the backers present at the signing ceremony openly bragging that it will allow discrimination against LGBT people. If Pence signed a regular RFRA law, literally no one would care, and this whole debate would not have happened.
Why do you consistently refuse to address this point I and many others have made repeatedly? You're not "too busy", you just don't want to address it. You have all this time to write walls of text of flowerly language and endless truisms, surely you can reply to the questions I have asked you repeatedly about your positions.
Except it was different for the reasons I explained above. Do you think everyone just decided to get mad about nothing? Do you really think there were no ulterior motives behind the passage of this bill, especially considering Pence's political background and his failed attempt to constitutionally ban gay marriage in January 2014, and considering who helped him craft this legislation, them being present at the signing, and their openness about what they hoped to accomplish with this legislation?
The reason there is no precedent is because this situation has never happened before. It is "unprecedented" that gay marriage is legal in modern, Western country like it is becoming in the United States, and so there has been no precedent in bigots trying to hide behind their religion and appropriate otherwise uncontroversial laws for exploitation.
Again: you have not adequately responded to this point in past threads.
There will always be some restrictions on religious liberty. It's a balancing act. I am fine with the original federal RFRA and state laws passed in the late-90s/early-2000s, because those were pased in response to a legitimate example of government entities unnecessarily restricting religious practices.
But religious liberty is not something that can be used to walk all over secular rights, and vice-versa, as it has been and is understood by our legal system. From your constant talking of being concerned about religious liberty, I'm getting the impression that you think that religious liberty is absolute and superior to all other liberties.
I don't care if a church doesn't want to marry a same-sex couple; a church is a private institution. I don't care if a private membership club wants to deny membership to gays, people of other races, or people of different faiths, or if a local women's group refuses to admit men to their meetings. I don't care if someone decides to stop talking to me because i"m gay, or that my beliefs don't totally line up with theirs, or because I'm male, or whatever other arbitrary trait causes the issue. I'll avoid them, and they can avoid me, which is mine and their right to association and non-association.
What I do care about, is when a business that claims to be open to the general public decides to discriminate against people and can defend themselves in court because the state decided to stick it to a group of people they have been taught to hate by some passage in a text. The people who vocally oppose SSM and anti-discrimination laws are seeking to create an anti-gay Jim Crow environment, as they have openly stated repeatedly.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. There will always be vigorous debate and back-and-forth between competing groups.
I don't see it that way. For the gay rights movement and feminists, it's simply asserting their rights to marriage and the freedom to live their lives without fear of discrimination, and the correction of wide range of wrongs perpetrated based on gender, respectively. No one is proposing the wholesale removal of religion from public life. This isn't a black-and-white, yes-or-no, this-or-that debate.
I oppose the two sections in the Indiana RFRA law, support the federal and 19 other states' RFRA laws, and wear religious symbols around my neck and as tattoos, and am totally fine with Presidents declaring religious observances (I would do that myself if I was POTUS). Do you think I am without religion or religious beliefs?
These are not mutually exclusive or conflicting beliefs. If someone tried to pass an equivalent of a French secularity law (aka "the burqa ban"), you and I would find ourselves cooperating in opposition.
"Certain sensibilites" being the drive to create a segregated society is a perfectly valid scenario where religions
SHOULD hurry back into the walls of a church or private home.
Again: this is a balancing act. There is a difference between something legal and ethical/moral in business. If a customer enters your store and simply purchases a good or service you offer, you shouldn't be able to deny them the good/service simply because your religion told you to shun "those people". If a customer is disrespectful to me or my coworkers, steals, breaks things, bothers other customers, in other words disrupt business, I can ask them to leave and ask them not to come back. But I cannot see someone walk in the door and refuse to ring them up simply because of some arbitrary trait they possess. That of course is subject to certain exceptions, but gay people eating wedding cake is not one of them.
From a quick read of news articles, the company simply reassigned him to a different load without issue, and since alcohol delieveries are only 5% of that company's revenues, they can't claim it was a burdensome accomodation.
It is clear that the company forced the man out unreasonably. The government is not going to fine Muslims for things like this. That is a slippery-slope fallacy.
