Civil Rights and Discrimination

Boy Scouts and Religious Freedom Exemption: Battle Awaits

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As anticipated, and at long last, the Boy Scouts of America have voted to allow openly gay men and lesbians to be adult employees and volunteer leaders. As the AP notes, however:

Several denominations that collectively sponsor close to half of all Scout units—including the Roman Catholic church, the Mormon church and the Southern Baptist Convention—have been apprehensive about ending the ban on gay adults.

The Boy Scouts of America’s top leaders have pledged to defend the right of any church-sponsored units to continue excluding gays as adult volunteers. But that assurance has not satisfied some conservative church leaders.

“It’s hard for me to believe, in the long term, that the Boy Scouts will allow religious groups to have the freedom to choose their own leaders,” said the Rev. Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “In recent years I have seen a definite cooling on the part of Baptist churches toward the Scouts,” Moore said. “This will probably bring that cooling to a freeze.”

While conservative religious leaders aren’t happy, LGBT activists aren’t overjoyed, either:

Stuart Upton, a lawyer for the LGBT-rights group Lambda Legal, questioned whether the BSA’s new policy to let church-sponsored units continue to exclude gay adults would be sustainable. “There will be a period of time where they’ll have some legal protection,” Upton said. “But that doesn’t mean the lawsuits won’t keep coming. … They will become increasingly marginalized from the direction society is going.”

Moreover, in a released statement headlined “Local Exemptions Will Allow Discrimination to Continue,” Chad Griffen, president of the Human Rights Campaign, lamented that “including an exemption for troops sponsored by religious organizations undermines and diminishes the historic nature of today’s decision.”

The conventional wisdom goes that if activists on the right and left are both unhappy, then it’s probably an appropriate, centrist solution. And that may be true here. Church-sponsored BSA troops are somewhat unique in that the Boy Scouts are not a self-defined religious organization, but troops are highly identified with, and reflect the characteristics of, their local sponsors.

It’s unclear how future lawsuits will turn out, but the public is unlikely to support LGBT activists on this one (polls show a majority favor religious exemptions from anti-discrimination law, even among those who support marriage equality).

More. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a statement saying “the admission of openly gay leaders is inconsistent with the doctrines of the Church and what have traditionally been the values of the Boy Scouts of America,” and that “When the leadership of the Church resumes its regular schedule of meetings in August, the century-long association with Scouting will need to be examined.”

Given that troops sponsored by the Mormon church will have a religious exemption allowing them to exclude gay adults, the response seems excessively churlish and suggests that the Mormons believe all scout troops must abide by Mormon values. That’s as polarizing, and totalistic, as the progressives who believe in no exemptions for religious organizations that sponsor troops.

Furthermore. This AP story reports that the Mormons may be looking for an opportunity to form their own worldwide scouting movement for boys, completely under church control. Similarly, the LDS does not sponsor Girl Scout troops and instead oversees its own Young Women’s program.

That’s a loss for Mormon youth, as one of the great benefits of scouting is the way it brings young people into contact with others from diverse backgrounds.

Also, via the Washington Post, Why Mormons are so devastated by the Boy Scout vote on gay leaders.

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Equality Act Is New Cause

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With congressional Democrats’ introduction last week of the Equality Act, ENDA (the Employee Non-Discrimination Act) is officially dead. The previous bill, which targeted employment discrimination, had a long, sad history—just when it seemed to have enough bipartisan support to pass, a number of influential activists organizations announced their opposition because the measure didn’t include gender identity along with sexual orientation. Later, when gender identity was added, it was too much for the bill’s GOP (and centrist Democratic) supporters, at that time. The strategy of step by step, first one, than the other, was never viewed as acceptable by some activists.

In any event, during the first two years of the Obama administration, when Democrats enjoyed filibuster-proof majorities in Congresss, ENDA was kept bottled up in committee; only after the GOP retook the House in midterm elections did Democrats moved to bring the bill back to life.

The Equality Act seeks to amend the iconic Civil Rights Act 1964 to include sexual orientation and gender identity, in employment, housing, education, jury service(!) and public accommodations, with no religious exemptions for businesses such as wedding caterers and photographers to pass on gigs involving gay marriages. It has zero chance of passing Congress, dominated by the GOP. That’s not the point; Democrats will use it to rally LGBT and progressive support in coming elections.

Yet some LGBT activists are not united in support; some fear that opening the Civil Rights Act to amendments could be dangerous, allowing Republicans to introduce their own amendments to weaken, for instance, race- and gender-based preferential treatment and the use of disparate impact analysis to find discrimination where none was intended. It’s unclear that there is evidence Republicans would try to do that (the attacks upon them by liberal media would be merciless), but that’s the stated concern.

So don’t expect the Equality Act to become law anytime soon, or perhaps ever. But keep a lookout for fundraising letters from its supporters coming to your mailbox shortly.

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Turning Victory to Defeat

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A new Associated Press-GfK poll, conducted July 9 to July 13—less than three weeks after the Supreme Court ruled states cannot ban same-sex marriage—showed 42 percent support same-sex marriage, down from the 48 percent who said so in an April poll.

Asked specifically about the Supreme Court ruling, 39 percent said they approve and 41 percent said they disapprove.

The AP reports:

“Overall, if there’s a conflict, a majority of those questioned think religious liberties should win out over gay rights, according to the poll. While 39 percent said it’s more important for the government to protect gay rights, 56 percent said protection of religious liberties should take precedence.”

This is the cultural landscape in which LGBT activist leaders, post-marriage victory, are declaring their number one objective is passage of a comprehensive LGBT civil rights statute that will force service providers with religious objections to perform creative services for same-sex weddings.

Under their progressive leadership, which views state coercion backed by the threat of force and punishment as the prime tool for achieving cultural aims, we might yet see a backlash that turns victory into defeat.

More. Via Walter Olson, whether churches could lose tax-exempt status for not embracing same-sex marriage. There are, fortunately, constitutional barriers, but for some progressives it’s the stuff of their dreams.

Finally, the Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon exlains why “A society that cannot tolerate differing views—and respect the live-and-let-live principle—will not long be free.”

And the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins further elaborates:

Americans seem inclined to support this nuanced view that businesses should serve all customers regardless of sexual orientation, religion, race, gender, income, national origin, etc.—but that wedding-related businesses requiring owners’ direct participation in the wedding should not be forced to provide service against the owners’ religious beliefs….

Taken together, these polls suggest that a sizeable share of Americans think the state should not prohibit same-sex couples from getting married and that the state should not require wedding-related business owners with religious objections to provide services against their will.

Popular opinion isn’t always right; this time it’s spot on.

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Pandering and Ploys

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In his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, How the GOP Can Avoid Becoming the Pan Am Party, Andy Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants, wrote:

Gay rights is another issue in which Republicans risk alienating potential conservative voters, particularly younger ones. It is reasonable to believe that the states and the people should determine what constitutes marriage, not five justices. But the Supreme Court ruled last month in Obergefell v. Hodges—and it’s over.

There has been talk of a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision, and candidates should drop it. That would require a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by 38 of the states. The chances of that happening are nil. More than 35 states had already legalized same-sex marriage before Obergefell, and Pew Research found in June that 57% of Americans and 73% of millennials favored it. It’s counterproductive for Republicans to look like social Neanderthals to a majority of Americans and a supermajority of young voters. There are better issues for the GOP—religious liberty, for instance.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker obviously disagrees, and last week doubled down on his courting of evangelicals in Iowa (where he leads in the polls) and the Deep South by condemning the Boy Scouts of America’s recent moves toward allowing openly gay scoutmasters. Walker said the Boy Scout’s current exclusionary policy “protected children and advanced Scout values.” Two days later, following an uproar over equating gay adults and pedophiles, Walker tried to, well, walk that back somewhat, but not very convincingly.

Jeb Bush had a better week, as he continues to try finding a course that recognizes reality without further alienating the GOP’s socially conservative base:

He added that in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, the country must work to carefully balance the rights of those seeking to marry and the religious beliefs of those who oppose those unions.

Citing the frequently-used example by religious freedom advocates, Bush said that in the case of a florist approached by a gay couple, “you should be obligated to sell them flowers, doing otherwise would be discriminatory.” But he said that the objecting florist should not be required to participate in the wedding, a fine line that he hopes will appeal to all sides of the debate.

When the employee followed up to ask specifically whether he would support anti-discrimination laws for LGBT Americans for their housing and employment—the next target for gay rights marriage advocates—Bush said he would at the state level.

The state-level ploy isn’t going to win many adherents on either side, but at least he’s trying to find a consensus on anti-discrimination and religious liberty that might be an alternative to the outraged polarization that dominates the argument today.

More. David Lampo, who serves on the national board of the Log Cabin Republicans, explains Yes, Governor Huckabee, Gay Rights Are Civil Rights. Posted on the conservative Daily Caller site, not the liberal echo chamber.

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The EEOC’s LGB Fiat

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The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has ruled, 3 to 2, that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars sexual orientation-based employment discrimination as a form of sex discrimination, which Chris Geidner at BuzzFeed called “a groundbreaking decision to advance legal protections for gay, lesbian, and bisexual workers.”

The EEOC’s ruling deals with sexual orientation (lesbian, gay, bisexual); the agency had previously found that discrimination on the basis of gender identity, transitioning, or transgender status was covered by the civil rights statute as sex discrimination, and has sued employers on that premise.

But as Walter Olson of the Cato Institute has noted in a series of posts, including here, courts have built a record of knocking down the EEOC on its stretchy interpretations of law. (Geidner’s article claims the contrary, but Olson’s evidence seems persuasive.)

To the extent that an employer could, say, fire a lesbian employee based on provable bias but not fire any of the heterosexual women it employs, the claim of anti-female animus (the basis of what has generally been deemed sex discrimination under the statute) would seem difficult to prove. Still, it will be interesting to see how this plays out, and it could even end up before the Supreme Court.

More. From libertarians who strongly support same-sex marriage. Walter Olson blogs: EEOC: Let Us Imagineer ENDA For You. And from Scott Shackford at Reason.com: EEOC Attempts to Administratively Implement Protections Against Anti-Gay Discrimination.

From our comments, Craig123 writes:

You can support nondiscrimination and still think the EEOC sholudn’t be stretching the law beyond its limits, because if (as is widespread under this administration) the law means anything that a federal agency says it means, some day an administration you don’t like is going to come in and declare, by fiat, that all the laws you like don’t actually say what they say.

These are valid concerns not to be lightly dismissed or, per some, vilified. It’s also possible that the EEOC’s ruling, if it stands, would be less offensive to individual liberty than the broad federal statute activists now demand, applying the race-discrimination standard to sexual orientation regarding employment and public accommodations (which, for them, includes providing creative services in support of same-sex weddings, with no religious exemptions).

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Illiberal Liberals Endanger Everyone’s Rights

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IGF sometimes guest blogger Walter Olson has penned a piece over at Richocet explaining why Oregon’s “cease and desist” order is “not a result liberals should applaud.” Excerpt:

Even more remarkably, the state agency had demanded damages from the Kleins over the very fact of media coverage sympathetic to their cause, which was said to have inflicted further trauma on their adversaries’ eggshell psyches. While [the Commissioner of the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, Brad Avakian] declined to grant a separate award of damages under this heading, he still declared the Kleins’ statements in their own defense “unlawful.”

The implication is clear enough: if locked in a legal battle with Oregon authorities, you may not have a legal right to rally your supporters with statements like “This fight is not over” and “We will continue to stay strong.”

Some day the attempt to strip opponents of progressivism of their fundamental rights is going to come back and be used against progressives themselves, who will then deny they had ever advocated such a position.

More. This gay baker shows that authoritarian zealots don’t represent all LGBT people.

Furthermore. Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy shows that Raw Story got it wrong by claiming that the bakers were fined for publishing the home address of the lesbian couple that brought the complaint. In a separate post, Volokh elaborates:

I think that Walter Olson (Ricochet), who is a supporter of same-sex marriage, and Ken White (Popehat) are right to criticize this part of the commissioner’s ruling [barring speech that shows an intent to discriminate]…. The bakers may rightly worry that, given the commissioner’s relatively broad understanding of what constitutes a statement of intent to discriminate, the commissioner (and the courts) will read his order equally broadly.

More from Walter Olson here on misreporting of fact by bloggers on the left and right, whose misstatements are then sent zooming around the internet.

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Support for Liberty Grows

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Despite steadily increasing support for same-sex marriage equality, “the percentage of people who agree that wedding service providers should be required to serve same-sex couples has fallen to 38% from 52% in 2013,” a 14-point drop in two years, according to the 2015 State of the First Amendment study by the Newseum and USA Today.

Correspondingly, “Americans’ support for the First Amendment rebounded strongly over the past year,” specifically, three-quarters of Americans say the First Amendment, protecting freedom of speech, of the press, and of religion “does not go too far,” a jump from 57% last year.

This rise in support for expressive and religious liberty is occurring as LGBT activists gear up to switch from fighting for marriage equality to fighting to deny the right of religious dissent. This trend is exemplified by Evan Wolfson, founder and president of Freedom to Marry, who has come out strongly against religious exemptions for businesses in the proposed federal Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a position he seems to be doubling down on after the marriage victory.

Even those with whom we strongly disagree about gay rights and equality have fundamental rights as Americans that must be protected, or else we will all suffer from the results when the state, backed by progressive activists, declares their freedoms denied.

More. In response to those who defend using the state to destroy small businesses that don’t toe the correct line, commenter Craig123 quotes Marx (facetiously, I think), who warned progressives that “The petite bourgeoisie is the most reactionary of classes” and thus must be pulled up by its roots. Given that other commenters have in prior posts charged this blog with “homocon idiocy” while themselves spouting the anti-capitalist anarcho-syndicalist ideas of Noam Chomsky (replacing corrupt private ownership with workers councils and all that), you get a sense of what some of them, in their fervid dreams, are really after—if only those outmoded individual rights can be put asunder.

Furthermore. Why I Support ‘No Gays Allowed’ (via the Huffington Post, and penned by C.J. Prince, executive director of North Jersey Pride, in case you thought it was by some self-loathing “homocon”). She writes that “As a strong supporter of freedom of speech and freedom of religion”:

I do not want to order a wedding cake from a bakery owned by a guy who thinks I’m going to hell. I have no desire to purchase bouquets from a florist who pickets Pride parades. …

If you don’t support my freedom to marry, have the guts to come out about it. Exercise your constitutional right to free speech, and I’ll support that. Then I’ll exercise my capitalist right to shop from your competitor—and to proudly put my money where my allies are.

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Fissures and Alliances

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At the conservative Washington Examiner, Philip Klein predicts Social Conservatives and Libertarians Will Get Married:

Perhaps fiercer than any of these fights is the long-standing conflict between social conservatives and libertarians. But when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage last month, they created an opening for a wedding between these two groups, which could benefit the Republican Party ahead of the 2016 election. . . .

But as the dust settles on the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, it’s becoming clearer that the debate over the issue is going to shift to one of religious freedom. And on that issue, there’s much more of an opening for libertarians and social conservatives to get along. . . .

But with gay marriage legal, the cultural debate has been moving to issues such as: Should a religiously observant baker or photographer be forced to participate in gay weddings? Or, should a Catholic Church be forced to perform gay marriages?

Whatever their differences on the underlying issue of homosexuality and gay marriage, it will be hard for many libertarians to justify any sort of government coercion forcing individuals to violate their deeply held beliefs. As a result, they’ll find themselves increasingly — and begrudgingly — on the same side as social conservatives on many of the looming debates.

Over at the libertarian Reason.com, Scott Shackford strikes a similar note, in Is This Where Libertarians and the Gay Community Part Ways?:

But just because libertarians and gay citizens were aligned in the pursuit of ending government mistreatment, that doesn’t mean other goals line up. Libertarians draw that bright, hard line between government behavior and private behavior. Others often do not, and what many gay activists see as justice and equality in the private sector, libertarians see as inappropriate government coercion.

Highlighting some of these contentions, William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal (A Win on Marriage: Now Protect Faith) addresses whether, for instance, religiously affiliated schools should be denied tax-exempt status for refusing to extend campus housing benefits given to opposite-sex married couples to same-sex spouses:

As part of a reasonable compromise that includes solid antidiscrimination provisions in education and housing, supporters of same-sex marriage should accept legislative language that prohibits the federal government from withholding or withdrawing tax exemptions from institutions solely on the basis of their opposition to Obergefell.

Underlying these specific issues—and others that will be even harder to resolve—is an urgent question: How can people with fundamentally different views peacefully coexist within the same political community? Except when confronted by pure evil, a generous pluralism is almost always the best course, as is magnanimity in victory.

I think most LGBT people, as opposed to LGBT activists and ideologues (whether beltway professionals, regional zealots, or correct-line-upholding blog commenters) are fine with live and let live, and don’t particularly wish to find and punish the tiny number of small service providers that have religious objections to gay weddings, or force religious schools to violate their faith principles. But activists need a mission. If they are intent on declaring religious freedom and dissent unacceptable hate behavior that must be rectified by the state, then this will, indeed, be a cause unacceptable to those who respect individual liberty.

More. Progressives clap and cheer dictates such as this awful ruling. Worse, not only were the bakers fined $135,000 for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian wedding, but the government has ordered them to “cease and desist” from speaking publicly about not being willing to bake cakes for same-sex weddings based on their religious beliefs, or face further fines. This is why defenders of individual rights and liberty are now at odds with the LGBT left.

Furthermore. More about the “cease and desist” order which is directed at preventing the bakery (now reduced to an online business) or, by extension, others, from stating that their services do not include same-sex weddings. Along with the extreme damages levied against the Kleins, it represents a further assault on their First Amendment rights.

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Cry Wolf

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If there are Christian tattoo artists, we may have the next wave of anti-anti-discrimination cases.

I can’t say I find Mr. Bythewood’s argument for not providing the tattoo particularly convincing (is there really a “traditional tattoo honor code?”) but that’s the point. I don’t have to.  It’s his business, and unless I’m very mistaken, he’s not the only tattoo artist in New York.

Anti-discrimination laws, including those based on gender, were most needed when discrimination was extensive, unregenerate and unlocalized.  Since the 1950s, America has switched the defaults, and marginalized the kinds of discrimination that were taken for granted: based on race, gender, and now even sexual orientation.  There will never be no discrimination unless someone has finally figured out a way to make a utopia work when its inhabitants will be human beings endowed with liberty.  The best a free society can hope for is to stand, as a whole, for individual liberty, draw clear enough lines about what is truly out-of-bounds, and leave the gray areas for people to negotiate.

Getting a tattoo, ordering a cake for your wedding, arranging for a photographer to document your happiness; these are perfectly respectable gray areas where there are choices pretty much anywhere in this country.  Those choices will not always be ideal ones everywhere, but unless the rule we are seeking is that everyone must have ideal choices everywhere, every time, we have to consider what the appropriate limits on government power must be.

I don’t want my government demanding that I can get a tattoo or a cake from anyone I want.  As an un-inked American, I could no more have gotten a tattoo from Mr. Bythewood than Jane Marie could.  Going somewhere else is one of the calamities I must live with as someone who values a free society.

Bythewood is partly right that Jane Marie trivializes the tradition of feminism with her overstated “wolf cry.”  But that kind of self-dramatizing is becoming endemic.  As true discrimination has diminished, it takes more effort to play the victim.  Histrionics are practically necessary.

This does not just trivialize the profoundly important movements that got us to today, it trivializes government itself.  There are vitally important things that we should expect of our government.  But policing an infinite number of daily commercial and personal transactions is not among them.

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Make It So

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Patrick Stewart believes in freedom, especially expressive freedom. In defending a baker’s right not to bake a cake with a pro-gay-marriage message, he explained:

In my view, this particular matter was not about discrimination, but rather personal freedoms and what constitutes them, including the freedom to object. Both equality and freedom of speech are fundamental rights—and this case underscores how we need to ensure one isn’t compromised in the pursuit of the other.

The arguments of progressive LGBT activists that it’s not ok for a religiously conservative baker to refuse to make a cake with a pro-gay-marriage message, but it is ok for a gay baker to refuse to bake a cake with an anti-gay-marriage message, is all too typical of the strained logic that amounts to whatever progressives want, the state should make sure they receive. And if this limits the expressive rights of their opponents, it’s a bonus!

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