Because Our Rights Are the Only Rights that Matter?

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6 Comments for “Because Our Rights Are the Only Rights that Matter?”

  1. posted by Mike King & David "TJ" Bauler on

    I know many progressives that are willing to fairly balance religious freedom with civil rights. Some of them post here. Maybe Stephen needs to get out of his safe space and meet some new people.

  2. posted by Jorge on

    Nope. I don’t care. Helps that I’ve paid some attention to the ups and downs of federal regulations (contracting included) for years. “It all dates back to an Obama-era policy” indeed.

    So my friend asks me if I really think it’s okay to fire unmarried women for becoming pregnant. (Right. I lost that one a very long time ago but I don’t tell him that because of his very cross expression.) I give him an example relevant to our job: if we are talking about religious exemptions, let’s talk about foster care agencies that find placement for unaccompanied minors who cross the border illegally. As I think most of us here know, a good portion of foster care agencies are or once were faith-based organizations. It is the business of a foster care agency to have a theory about what kind of families make good, moral foster or adoptive families for their charges, and that does and should extend to issues such as the sexual conduct between unmarried people and whether or not two men or two women are a family. That’s directly an employment decision. It is also the business of a foster care agency to have a theory on childhood development of sex and gender identity, and what is the most healthy means to raise and instruct a transgender child. That’s more a professional decision.

    This is admittedly an outlier of an example, but it is also one that grows in prominence. I am also concerned about the Little Sisters of the Poor case where the Catholic organization was being required to subsidize and facilitate the purchase of birth control, some forms of which it reasonably believes to be abortifacents.

    I am a firm believer in legislating morality. There is a difference between legislating the way things should be and saying there can only be one way of doing things. It is not only the government that should be permitted to provide leadership on what morality is, especially when it comes to religious actors.

    • posted by JohnInCA on

      And is it also the buisness of a foster or adoption agency to have a theory that Jews and Catholics don’t make good parents?

      ’cause that’s the waiver that the Trump admin gave out a few months back.

  3. posted by John on

    I read the Washington Times article. It wasn’t bad, although it was clearly biased. But then I read the comments. Scary, depressing, and maddening. Not one comment with an ounce of understanding towards the gay community. Equating us entirely with just sex and petulance. So sad.

  4. posted by JohnInCA on

    Hey, I’m fine with balancing non-discrimination law with religious protections.

    What I’m very explicitly not fine with is treating LGBT folk as a special category different from the rest.

    So if “because God” is a good enough reason to ignore non-discrimination laws when it comes to gay folk, it’s a good enough reason to ignore non-discrimination laws when it comes to black folk. If you’re not willing to accept that, then it’s not me who’s unwilling to compromise. It’s you that wants to privilege anti-LGBT religious beliefs over other religious beliefs.

  5. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    “This is not some apocalyptic rule opening the door to whimsical discrimination. This is a narrowly drawn rule for a minority of federal contractors. It’s really not that radical and not that new.”

    Angelo has accurately described the regulations on all three counts:

    (1) The rule is narrowly drawn to sanction discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation but not on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion or other protected classes under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and progeny.

    (2) Government sanctioned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is neither new nor radical.

    (3) The rule is definitely not whimsical; it aligns with the 2016 Republican platform and is intended to gin up support among the anti-gay conservative Christians who wrote that platform.

    Conservative homosexuals see this as a positive; the rest of us don’t.

    “LGBT progressives won’t recognize any need to balance anti-discrimination law with religious liberty protections.”

    Republican efforts to portray gays and lesbians as selfish, unreasonable and intolerant whenever gays and lesbians object to being singled out for special, targeted discrimination are neither new nor radical, either, for that matter. Miller is following the script Republicans have been following for 20-odd years.

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