Full disclosure – I’m an atheist. As such, “religious freedom” laws and the exemptions they provide strike me as an unearned privilege – as a not-religious person, I don’t have the ability to pull some unprovable story from my backside as justification for getting out of following whatever law I don’t like. So, in all honesty, I tend to resent the extra pass people who are religious get.
But, there is something about these laws and their application that bother me much more. Please follow me below the fold to find out what.
When religious freedom laws were passed in the early 1990s, the clear intent was to prevent needless interference in someone’s religious practices. The most well-known example is a chain clothing store whose policy forbade the wearing of a head scarf by an employee. This expression of belief involved the employee alone. No one else bore the brunt of her religious exercise. It affected only her.
What has changed in the intervening years, of course, is that “religious freedom” has been expanded to include the exercise of religion regardless of the impact on innocent bystanders. The Hobby Lobby case set the standard – according to the Supreme Court, the employer is entitled not only to choose not to use birth control himself, the employer can make the choice not to cover the birth control for his employees. Thus, “religious exercise” was expanded to involve others -- whether they shared the religious belief or not, and whether or not it inconvenienced or harmed them.
Now, the impact of this inconvenience or harm is supposed to be mitigated by the fact that these laws allow only for “reasonable accommodation” of religious belief. In the case of marriage equality, that means that if a gay couple or a lesbian couple shows up at a county clerk’s office and the government employee behind the counter refuses to provide the couple with a marriage license because it violates his or her “deeply held religious beliefs,” as long as someone else in the office provides the license, that constitutes reasonable accommodation. The religious person gets what they want, and the gay couple or lesbian couple eventually get what they want, too. No harm, no foul, right?
Well, not exactly. Consider our recent past. The argument could easily be made that separate drinking fountains for blacks were a “reasonable accommodation.” After all, the “colored” people got water to drink, didn’t they? In this case, however, the majority culture, after a lengthy, painful campaign on the part of black Americans, realized that this “accommodation” did little more than cause psychic harm to black people. It told them they were other, unclean, and not good enough to use the same drinking fountain as whites. We stopped this particular overt sign of public humiliation. (Sadly, others remain.)
So, why is it okay to allow religious accommodation when it comes to gay couples and lesbian couples getting legally married? The answer is, despite the interpretation of the law, it isn’t. The very act of refusing to provide marriage licenses for gay couples or a lesbian couples causes harm -- it tells the couples they're different, not good enough, that they're morally inferior. Just like the separate water fountains told blacks they were less than whites. That was the actual intent then, and, of course, it’s the actual intent of those who profess a "deeply held religious belief" now. It’s the ability to hurt someone else without consequence and, in the case of invoking religious accommodation, to call oneself "Godly" while doing it.
The law, as currently interpreted, may allow it, but that doesn't make it any less sickening. And it doesn’t fool anyone as to what is really going on, because we’ve seen this all before.