Files these under signs of the times.
Greeting customers as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” — or even not using the pronoun “ze” or “zir” — could prove costly for New York City businesses under rules drafted by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s bureaucrats.
The Gotham mayor’s Commission on Human Rights says entities that fail to address customers by their preferred gender pronouns and titles are in violation of the law and could be subject to penalties of up to $250,000.
Law professor Eugene Volokh comments:
this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak.
I hope there aren’t any Quakers in NYC who still would like to refer to folks by “thee” and “thou.”
Our message on your (church) property:
Greg Bourke and Michael De Leon, who also were among the plaintiffs in the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court case creating a constitutional right to gay marriage, are accusing the Archdiocese of Louisville of discriminating against them for rejecting their headstone design celebrating gay marriage.
The two men bought a joint burial plot in St. Michael Cemetery, which is run by the Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Louisville.
They later submitted a design of a headstone for the plot, which featured an inscription of the couple’s wedding rings interlocking and an image of the Supreme Court building.
In a letter marked March 30, the Archdiocese denied the headstone design request, saying it goes against Catholic teaching on marriage. … The Archdiocese said other designs on the headstone, including “both your names and dates of birth and of course the religious symbol of the cross,” were acceptable. “However, we cannot approve the depiction of the Supreme Court building and the use of wedding rings.”
Bourke said the Archdiocese is exempt from the local Fairness Ordinance that prohibits discrimination against members of the LGBT community, and the “Archdiocese has every legal right to do what they’re doing,” Bourke said. “We have no protection whatsoever in a situation like this.”
Which suggests he thinks they ought to have such “protection” to force the archidiocese to allow symbols and statements on church property that it finds at odds with the Catholic faith.
In both these stories, those pursing their objectives in the name of equality think what they want trumps the expressive, property and faith rights of others.
More. Via the Wall Street Journal’s Notable & Quotable, remarks by Cuban poet and human-rights activist Armando Valladares on receiving the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’s Canterbury Medal in New York, May 12:
Just as there is a short distance between the U.S. and Cuba, there is a very short distance between a democracy and a dictatorship where the government gets to decide what we believe and what we do. And sometimes this is not done at gunpoint but instead it is done one piece of paper at a time, one seemingly meaningless rule at a time, one silencing at a time. Beware young friends. Never compromise. Never allow the government—or anyone else—to tell you what you can or cannot believe or what you can and cannot say or what your conscience tells you to have to do.