Worth Reading #1
The Heart of the Issue on Legal Gay Marriage
Ben Domenech has a must-read commentary on gay marriage and the future of religious liberty. He argues that most of the public debate about gay marriage is peripheral chatter—spousal benefits, raising children, or redefining a foundational social institution. He contends that the fundamental issue in this debate is whether religious liberty will continue in the United States. I wish I could reprint the entire column here, but I can’t. Here’s a snippet:
The real problem with gay marriage is that the nature of the marriage union is inherently entwined in the future of the first line of the Bill of Rights: our right to religious liberty. Orthodox believers of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faiths were slow to understand this. I’m talking about something much bigger here than the discrimination lawsuits brought across the country against bakers and photographers: I’m talking about whether churches will be able to function as public entities in an era where their views on sin, particularly sexual sin, are in direct conflict with not just opinion but the law – and proselytizing those views from the pulpit or in the public square will be viewed as using the protection of religious expression to protect hateful speech.
We saw this problem already in Illinois’ marriage law, where churches that do not allow same sex unions would essentially have to close their doors to full participation in civil society. We see it as a constant issue regarding Canada’s hate speech laws, where courts must discern whether quoting Bible verses amounts to “harming the public discourse.” We will see it more here. That obvious oncoming clash strikes me as the most troublesome aspect of this, and the one that has received the least attention in the rush to legalize. The argument has been more about benefits and social outcomes and “won’t somebody think of the children”, ignoring the core problem, which raises challenges to the freedom of speech and expression the likes of which led to the pilgrims crossing the sea in the first place.
The conflict between sexual liberty and religious liberty is unlikely to be one the religious will win, in large part because of the broad and increasing acceptance of an idea President Obama has espoused more than once in public: that the religious have a freedom to worship, and that’s where it ends. When you leave the pew, you must leave your faith there. Among the religious, this is absurd – their entire lives are defined by their faith, in ways large and small. For both Christianity and Islam, the core of their faith is built on a call to take the message to the world, spreading it through public witness and preaching. Yet this belief in the limited freedom to worship is what led Obama’s administration to argue that faith-based hiring and firing is a discriminatory act for religious entities. It will lead to similar cases in the years to come regarding the marriage issue, but not just focused in that space – expect it to factor in divorce proceedings, custody battles, and more points involving the nice folks from Child Protective Services. Expect it also to factor in dramatically expanding the scope of these discrimination lawsuits – think on the doctor in California who was brought up on discrimination charges for referring a lesbian couple to a colleague for artificial insemination.Read the rest here. I have said this before, and I will say it again. Americans have not even begun to think seriously about the implications of redefining marriage. There will be consequences that we all have to live with and that won’t be easy to roll-back once we’re all in.
Christians, you need to be paying attention. Religious liberty is on the line, and it will eventually affect you.
Worth Reading #2
Finally, consider the matter of tax exemption. In its 1983 ruling in Bob Jones University v. United States, the Supreme Court affirmed, by an 8-1 vote, the power of the Internal Revenue Service to declare that it was “contrary to public policy,” since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Court’s own 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia overturning bans on interracial marriage, to grant tax-exempt status to a religious university that admitted both white and black students but forbade them to date and marry one another. All nine justices presumed the sincerity of the university’s stated religious rationale for its policy, and none of them (even the lone dissenter) thought it mattered a bit. The Court’s decision forced Bob Jones University to change its policy.
One can deplore that university’s former policy and applaud the change that was forced on it. But we must recognize that the Bob Jones precedent is a loaded gun waiting to be picked up and used against religious schools, universities, social service agencies, hospitals and clinics, and charitable ministries of all kinds. If same-sex marriage is the new normal, and dissent from it on religious grounds is the new bigotry, then with a stroke of a pen the IRS can destroy the tax-exempt status of every para-church institution in the country that is not on board with the redefinition of marriage—and perhaps of the core institutions too, the churches, synagogues, and mosques themselves.
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