National Review Online
Monday, March 30, 2015
Indiana has adopted a state-level version of the federal
Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), thereby imposing a “strict scrutiny”
legal standard when the state government or local powers pass laws that
interfere with the free exercise of religion. For this, Governor Mike Pence and
Indiana’s legislators have been denounced as gay-hating monsters, a claim that
was never made about President Bill Clinton, who signed the federal RFRA, or
about the people and powers of such liberal states as Connecticut, which is one
of the 20 states with a RFRA. Another dozen or so states have constitutional
provisions similar to those in RFRA.
Indiana’s law is controversial for two possible reasons.
The first is political: Democrats, unhappily laboring under the largest
Republican congressional majority since before the New Deal, are looking to
pick fights over issues such as gay rights, abortion, and environmental
regulation, believing that this will help their fund-raising and invigorate
their demoralized partisans. The second reason might be more substantive:
Indiana’s law, like some other state RFRAs (but unlike the federal statute,
which has been interpreted in different ways by different courts), expressly
states that it allows religious practice to be raised as a defense not only
when the government is a party to the controversy but also in litigation
undertaken by private parties under state law — including laws that prohibit
discrimination against homosexuals. Which is to say, this is another skirmish
in the endless battle of the Big Gay Wedding Cake.
Critics say that Indiana’s RFRA amounts to a license to
discriminate; it isn’t — far from being a blanket grant of immunity, it simply
allows religious liberties to be raised as a defense in lawsuits. That
religious liberties may be offered as a defense is not a guarantee that this
defense will be accepted by a court.
The RFRA story is tangled. The original impetus for the
federal law was a Supreme Court decision holding that American Indians need not
be granted exemptions to drug laws so that they may use peyote in religious
rituals, a fact that surely must be a comfort to the senior senator from
Massachusetts. The federal RFRA aimed to restore the constitutional standard
that the Court jettisoned in that case. At first, the federal law applied both
to the federal government and to state and local governments, but it was later
restricted to federal applications when the Supreme Court found that Congress
had overstepped its constitutional authority in preempting state and local
governments. As a result of that decision, many states adopted their own
versions of RFRA.
RFRA enjoyed wide bipartisan support until the Hobby
Lobby case reminded Democrats that they care a great deal more about Obamacare
and contraceptive subsidies than they do about the religious liberties of
people who hold views that inconvenience the Democrats’ political platform.
RFRA, in both the federal and the Indiana versions, is a
piece of law aimed at allowing for the emergence of social compromise. RFRA
reasoning does not give religious persons or institutions the power to simply
ignore laws that conflict with their consciences; rather, it compels the
government to demonstrate a compelling government interest when it burdens
religious expression, and to accomplish any substantial burdening of religious
liberty in the least invasive manner. Both of those requirements — compelling
government interest, least burdensome means — are open to a considerable degree
of interpretation, which is of course by design: That is what allows a modus
vivendi to emerge.
Gay-rights activism is, just at the moment, very much
oriented toward preventing the emergence of any social compromise on the matter
of homosexual marriage, which is why tradition-minded florists and bakers,
generally conservative Christians, are being targeted for prosecution as
enemies of civil rights. In terms of government interest, homosexual couples
planning wedding receptions in Connecticut are a good deal less compelling than
were black Americans who were effectively circumscribed from public life —
political, social, and economic — under the machinery of oppression constructed
by Democrats after the Civil War. Among other things, the market provides
same-sex couples plenty of other options. But gay-rights activists insist that
the situations are morally and politically identical. That this view is rightly
received with some skepticism by the general public — including much of the
public inclined to support gay marriage and similar issues — is why the
increasingly fanatical homosexual activists reject the notion that religious
liberty might even be raised as an issue in the case of a wedding planner who
does not wish to be involved in the blessing of a homosexual union. Their goal
is a coercive coast-to-coast regime with no room for social compromise at all.
Gay Americans in Pennsylvania and Florida do not seem to
have been very much burdened by those states’ RFRA statutes, nor by similar
constitutional provisions in such bastions of reaction as Massachusetts and
Minnesota. But individuals such as Jack Phillips of the Masterpiece Cakeshop in
Colorado have been made into outlaws because their religious scruples compel
them to forgo the custom of clients planning same-sex weddings. There is no
guarantee that Indiana’s RFRA will prevent that sort of heavy-handed coercion
in the Hoosier State, but it creates the opportunity for coming to a sensible
arrangement that respects the dignity of all parties involved. And that,
needless to say, is why the people who perversely call themselves liberals
oppose it.
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