People shouldn’t be given the special right to discriminate. And being in favor of discrimination shouldn’t be a protected class. Attacking someone else’s civil rights or equality (even via plain old speech or the political process) shouldn’t be a protected class, religious or not.
The Mormon Church is saying we can only have anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBT people if there are special rights to discriminate for religious people and protections from them never being fired for their hateful activities or attitudes. http://www.bilerico.com/...
If any mainstream person makes this false equivalency or thinks this is a reasonable argument, I’ll ask them this: should we repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other previously passed anti-discrimination laws unless and until racists and sexists have protection from getting fired?
Civil rights laws make it so you can’t discriminate against a religion. It doesn’t religions the right to discriminate.
All bigotry is toxic, wrong, destructive, degrading, and hurtful including homophobic bigotry. No bigotry is essential to who someone is, unlike things that are protected classes. Why should any type of villainy be a protected class and why should harming others be considered okay and protected simply because it is done in the name of religion? Also, just because hate speech is constitutional does this make it a reason to hire someone, not fire them from a position of power, not boycott them, etc.? Since when do things that happen to be legal, but still hurtful, get some kind of protection from social and economic blowback? Why should this? What about Donald Sterling’s free speech? Would the people who single out anti-LGBT bigotry as okay defend his right to be a racist remaining in his former prominent position?
As for the Mormons' requested “compromise”, protection FOR discrimination and its supporters cannot be compared to protection FROM discrimination for innocent people. And again we don’t do that for racists, Anti-Semites, or sexists even if some may think that this is not a reason to fire them. A group of people like Mormons who are so averse to “redefining” words such as marriage should not be redefining what discrimination laws have always been about.
Even if whether you are a bigot should be a protected class, it should cover those who aren’t bigots also. It seems like homophobes are supposed to be protected from “discrimination”, but are Mormons and bigot-rights-activists standing up for pro-equality people’s right to not be fired? Are people being tricked into supporting rights for bigots over non-bigots, as well as rights of bigots over LGBT people? How is this NOT a case of special rights for conservative Christians?
The deal the Mormons want to make is this: Give religion-associated bigotry a special right to discriminate, or LGBT people get protected from discrimination at all. This is not a deal we’ve had to broker for any other minority or discriminated-against group. We shouldn’t set a precedent with LGBT people, or act like their rights are somehow up for more compromise.
And then there's the narrative about Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, and people who were supposedly "discriminated" against for being anti-LGBT; this is a topic of discussion because the religious right is trying to make us look like hypocrites if we don't want hatemongers to be another protected class. That's more insidious than just being pro-discrimination, as it pushes the equality movements' hands into accepting false equivalencies. But you know maybe if they said "Let's not protect people of color unless racists are a protected class also", the bait-and-switch would be more clear to more people. People can disagree with whether anti-LGBT bigots should get any comeuppance for it, without falsely equating such comeuppance with discrimination against people who haven’t hurt anyone.
As for LDS people and evangelicals thinking their first amendment rights are under attack because they get criticism and blowback for attacking others, I’d ask them what about others’ constitutional rights that you are definitely attacking? What about the constitutional separation of church and state? What about the rights of those who aren’t even in your denomination but are affected by your theocratic agenda? Not to forget about the unaccepting and psychologically torturing abuse towards queer youth in your own denomination, which should not be protected as freedom of religion any more than physical child abuse, or letting kids die without medical care for religious reasons. I hope people are supporting the new efforts- successful in a couple of stats already- to ban “reparative therapy” for minors.
The religious right use free speech as something to hide behind, falsely thinking that if they get any blowback it is a violation of their free speech, when in reality it is only they who are attacking others’ rights and violating the constitution. They say that if we don’t worship at the foot of their hatred, we’re intolerant of them; and therefore how dare we ask for tolerance for our own basic humanity! Any minorities they hate shouldn’t have to tolerate intolerance in order to get basic human tolerance for themselves. And if we show any understandable anger when we criticize their dehumanizing agenda, way too many people (including some non-conservatives) claim we’re the hateful ones or equate how “both sides” are too hateful. Even some gay conservatives do this, putting defense of the conservative social hierarchy over their own rights, and/or putting their own party’s talking points over their own dignity.
Why does legitimate anger about being dehumanized and disenfranchised get equated with bigots’ groundless hatemongering? Such comparisons, at least on the part of people in the middle, seem meant to be peacemaking but instead add insult to injury.
Public accommodations, even in privately owned businesses, are places where the entire public can come and the entire public gets all the same services offered, in a nutshell. This is why turn-away-the-gay allowances aren’t just allowing “religious freedom”. They are allowing discrimination in a non-religious setting where anyone should be able to expect treatment. LGBT people should be just as allowed as others to expect service from any particular businesses without getting humiliatingly turned away or without the burden of having to search further, when other people aren’t having to go through these same things. The burden should never be on the discriminatee to be inconvenienced at all, no matter how much it personally troubles the discriminator. If a religious homophobe doesn’t like that, fine, just don’t be in business. Other people are more entitled to their civil rights than you are to their business. Most reasonable people should put civil rights above business rights (regardless of what conservatives and libertarians might argue!).
Religion is already a protected class. If not letting a religious person discriminate is itself religious discrimination, why not use this existing set of laws? Because they want something beyond not being discriminated against themselves. They want the special right to discriminate and hurt others that they feel are lesser. Religious freedom, conscience, morals, living your beliefs. In conservative evangelical/Mormon world, these are just code for being better than others and acting it out in ways that allow you to be above the law, and violate the church state separation. Religious freedom is a PR term much like death tax or the Clear Skies Act. It is about reframing something to make the perpetrators of a crime look like the victims and vice versa. Suddenly the evil gays must be coming out of the woodwork, demanding services like any other customer or citizen, and violating the “religious freedom” of the sweet little innocent conservative religious people that our culture likes to lionize and sentimentalize. Substitute evil gays with women who want birth control, secular people, and others disliked by the religious right, and you get the same story. As an article I recently read “Why We Can’t Get Religious Freedom Right” on LGBTQ Nation by Rob Donaldson (http://www.lgbtqnation.com/...) the “religious freedom” crowd doesn’t recognize others’ freedom of religion, orientation, or anything else because they are only concerned with the “freedom” to impose a particular religious vision on society regardless of how it affects anyone else. This is a vision in which LGBT pretty much don’t exist, or just shouldn’t . The religious right wants permanent second-class citizenship for everyone but them, especially for LGBT people, with cries of their “freedom” to religious manifestdestiny arising whenever this is challenged in any way. Just ask Native Americans how it works out when the establishment’s main concern is the macho white Christian’s right to manifestdestiny.
While this isn’t even needed to justify my views, it’s worth pointing out that claiming religious freedom to discriminate is not unique to Christianity and sexual orientation. Plenty of religions justified discrimination against women. The Southern Baptist Church broke off from the American Baptist Church because they supported slavery. People in the 1960’s used biblical quotes to justify racial discrimination and segregation. The people pushing for current religious exemptions and claiming they are unique do not even know the history of their own religion- or most of its holy book obviously either. And here’s my favorite video on this subject:
https://www.youtube.com/...
I’m sure many anti-Semites would think of religion as a reason to discriminate; should Anti-Semitism be a protected class or should this be thought of as any less toxic a bigotry, because of the Mormon church’s logic? No, and we need to see anti-LGBT bigotry in the same light.
In short, in no way should bigotry (or anything that is an act thereof) be a protected or lauded part of the discourse or interactions of a civil society. We don’t ban bigoted speech or participation in bigoted churches or political campaigns. Beyond that, we owe it nothing because a civil society sees it as toxic, wrong, hurtful, and to be discouraged through all legal and non-violent means.