David Link recently posted a thoughtful response to The Mormon Bargain, regarding the LDS leadership’s offer to support anti-discrimination legislation that protects LGBT people against housing and employment discrimination, as long as it includes religious liberty protection. Now, Jonathan Rauch has weighed in, and his op-ed in the New York Daily News, Gays should welcome this move by Mormons, is also worth reading.
Rauch takes the position that:
By coming forward to support new gay-rights protections, the church has publicly and pointedly broken with the confrontational approach of evangelicals, the Catholic Bishops and culture-warrior litigation groups like Alliance Defending Freedom. By doing so, it weakens those groups’ polarizing strategies and their claims to speak for religious conservatives.
If the Mormons’ outreach falls on deaf ears with gay-rights activists, religious hard-liners will gleefully say, “We told you so; gay-rights advocates are interested in fighting, not talking.”
Of course, some negotiations fail. But it would be self-defeating for gay civil-rights advocates not to probe the possibilities for compromise.
There are many gay people for whom allowing religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws—any religious exemptions—has now become anathema. This is a fairly recent development, promoted by those who seem dismissive of any right to religious dissent. It’s another sign of the abject polarization of our times.
More. Via the L.A. Times, An embrace that swayed the Mormon Church on gay rights. Mormon and gay-rights leaders spent five years exchanging views in back-channel talks. It won’t matter to progressive absolutists who reject any compromise that recognizes the value of religious liberty.
6 Comments for “More on the Mormon Offer”
posted by Houndentenor on
The objection, Stephen, and I don’t believe for a second that you don’t know this, is that a broad religious exemption makes the nondiscrimination laws pointless. The main objection to gay rights is the religious one. If anyone can claim religion as an exemption, then the law is unenforceable and accomplished nothing. If an empty gesture is what you are looking for, then this proposed law is for you. Personally I think it’s nothing more than a cynical PR move on the part of Mormons. They know it doesn’t actually offer any protections for gay people but also know that most of the media is too lazy to see through this move and that it will make them look like they are progressing on gay rights when they actually aren’t. I’m not impressed. It also fits into a narrative in which the religious right falsely claims that nondiscrimination laws will force the churches to do things they don’t want, even though laws against sex discrimination never made a Baptist church ordain women or Catholics to allow women to become priests. It’s a flat out lie just like everything else that comes from social conservatives these days. Why should we accept this offer? It doesn’t actually do anything for anyone.
posted by Doug on
That is just asinine. Mormons are saying they will agree to non discrimination in housing and employment except if it violates their religious doctrine, then they can discriminate. That makes no sense whatsoever.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
If proposed “religious exemptions” to non-discrimination laws are applicable across the board — religion-neutral, issue-neutral and class neutral — then a discussion about the nature, extent and wisdom of the exemptions makes sense, and is a discussion Americans should engage.
If, on the other hand, the “religious exemptions” are applicable to gays and lesbians, and gays and lesbians alone, then what is there to discuss? Why should gays and lesbians discuss proposed laws that, yet again, single them out for special discrimination?
The downside of special discrimination laws applicable to gays and lesbians, and gays and lesbians alone, are obvious — the laws sanction and perpetuate the systematic discrimination that has been aimed at gays and lesbians for centuries. Gays and lesbians have labored — often at great risk — to throw off the shackles of discrimination for the last 60 years.
No longer are our sexual acts criminalized, no longer are bars, clubs and other meeting places the subject of police raids, no longer are gays and lesbians who serve our country subject to military prison or dishonorable discharge, no longer are de-facto bans on gay/lesbian employment as teachers, lawyers and other professions in place, no longer are gays and lesbians forced to remain silent, out-of-sight to avoid beatings.
When I became an adult, before Stonewall, those forms of discrimination were the norm throughout our country. I have personally lived under them. I remember spending a night in a police station in Indiana being threatened with sodomy prosecution. I remember living in deep cover during six years in the military. I remember friends who were expelled from college because they got caught. I remember the days when gays and lesbians would not make partner in the good law firms. I remember friends who were dismissed as teachers.
I remember a lot, and it will be snowy day in hell before I acquiesce with allowing the law to enshrine yet another form of special discrimination into being.
The downside of special discrimination laws applicable to gays and lesbians, and gays and lesbians alone, with respect to the country as a whole are less obvious but very real. Every time we write special discrimination into law, we weaken the constitutional standard of “equal means equal”.
Our constitutional system is founded on the idea that all citizens should be treated equally under the law — no special rights, no special discrimination — unless the government has a compelling, rational reason grounded in the common good for making an exception to “equal means equal”.
Each time we depart from that standard, we weaken the standard and put the “equal means equal” rights of all Americans at risk.
So what, I ask, are the compelling rational reasons grounded in the common good for sanctioning special discrimination into public accommodations laws? What is it, for example, about same-sex marriage that is so repugnant to Mormons, Catholics and Christians that differentiates it from state-sanctioned adultery in the form of remarriage after divorce? And how is religious moral approbation relevant to the common good, in a way that is so compelling with respect to the common good that we must enshrine it in law, sanctioning it with the force of law?
Unless and until Stephen, Rauch and the other proponents of special discrimination under public accommodations laws can answer those questions, and question like those questions, clearly and convincingly, then I’m not buying.
I am appalled at the proposed laws, and appalled at the discussion, which is nothing more than yet another example of misdirection and obfuscation. The proponents of the so-called “religious exemptions” do not, and will not, probably because they can not, address the issues directly and honestly.
Instead, just as in the marriage equality debate, when we were treated to a lot of twaddle about “protecting the sanctity of traditional marriage”, none of which had basis in fact and smoke-screened the reality of discrimination for discrimination’s sake, now we are being treated to another pile of twaddle about “religious freedom” when the proposed laws don’t protect freedom of conscience at all.
I intend to fight against special discrimination in this tempest, just as I fought special discrimination on other fronts for my entire adult life. I don’t give a flying fork whether “religious hard-liners will gleefully say, ‘We told you so; gay-rights advocates are interested in fighting, not talking.’“. That’s what religious hard-liners have always said about gays and lesbians — and much worse, to tell the truth — and it is bunch of self-serving crap that the American people will see right through in time.
I’ll discuss, all right. I’ll discuss and discuss and discuss. I’ll point out that the laws propose special discrimination and I’ll explain why enshrining special discrimination into law is a bad for gays, bad for straights and bad for America. I’ll do it as long as it takes, in any and every forum in which the issue comes up.
posted by Tom Jefferson 3rd on
So…let us suppose that some sort of grand meetings of the minds occurs between the Church of Latter-Day Saints leadership and some sort of gay community delegation (how this delegation gets picked is another matter). What happens then……
Well….sexual orientation would be added to Utah equal opportunity in employment and housing…..unless the employer or land lord wants to say otherwise…..basically a law without zero enforcement potential and (taken to its logical conclusions) pretty much takes ALL private sector equal opportunity/civil rights laws and puts them in the category of “optional”.
If the Mormon Church is SERIOUS about having a conversation about equal opportunity in employment/housing and drafting reasonable exemptions that standup to Constitutional scrutiny…by all means start putting together the delegation of “approved” gays to meet and chat with the church.
posted by Mike in Houston on
It’s as serious as NOM talking about civil unions.
I really would like Steven and his home on cohorts provide a definition of what they mean by ‘religious liberty’. Have there been churches burned down? Preachers arrested? Tax-exempt status revoked? Muslim caterers required to make pulled-pork sandwiches? Please explain to me the boundaries…
posted by Tom Jefferson III on
Their is a place for religious exemptions in the law — at least in America. I do not know too many progressives (with a basic understanding of the jurisprudence/case law) who would tell you otherwise.
The lack of interest in the “compromises” promised thus far, seems to be less about hating religious freedom — as Stephen seems to claim/imply — and more a question of some faith based groups saying that the “First Amendment should only apply to me” and “the best way to keep a baker from having to bake a gay wedding cake, is to allow any business owner to do whatever the hell they want as long as they claim it is a religious belief.”