Can anybody explain to me the “Religious Freedom bill” in Indiana?
Please no links as I can easily find links myself but I’m too beat. Just a simple, brief explanation.
Thanks.
Religious Freedom Bill
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
Can anybody explain to me the “Religious Freedom bill” in Indiana?
Please no links as I can easily find links myself but I’m too beat. Just a simple, brief explanation.
Thanks.
Clarissa's Blog 
Religious Freedom Bills have been around since the 90’s when Native Americans fought for their right to carry and use Peyote for religious purposes. It was signed into law by Clinton, but left room for states to adopt it at their behest. At least 20 some states have their versions taken up for their own unique reasons.
These laws have prevented churches from being taken by domain seizures, have allowed imprisoned Muslims to grow beards, etc.
In Indiana people (however Republican we are on paper- I have yet to meet many who are in favor of this type of discrimination) are extremely upset about gay marriage- there are cake bakers and others in the wedding industry that want to refuse business to couples based on their orientation. They argue it is against their religion and that they should be allowed to conduct business that mirrors their personal beliefs. Also another factor is the Hobby Lobby contraception case that was closely followed by church goers. There are a handful of people here who don’t want to exchange money and services or goods with “sodomites”.
Most Hoosiers I know or follow are pissed at the legislation. We are in grave danger once again of losing lots of tourist and other business funds from organizations and famous individuals who are calling to boycott the state if Pence signs the document. This isn’t the first time Indiana has pushed discriminating legislation. Past legal pushes have been halted by extensive protesting see HR6. However, this has reached Pence and he does not seem to care that the vocal majority are opposed. So we shall see.
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So you support the right of forcing Jewish butchers to serve no kosher foods, and Muslims to serve pork?
The funny thing is you never see gay rights activists going to a synagogue or a mosque to get married; it’s always the Christians you go to because they will never fight back physically and will be ‘nice’.
So I can only conclude that gay rights activists are bullies and cowards.
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I have known gay couples who got married in a synagogue.
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And I’ve been at a beautiful Christian wedding of a straight couple that was married by a gay priest while the priest’s husband happily observed from the audience. There are normal people everywhere.
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My synagogue marries gay couples all the time. It doesn’t make the news because no one objects to it. I’m guessing you hear more about these issues with Christians because there are more Christians in this country than any other religion.
Jewish and Muslim owned butcher shops can’t be forced to serve pork because the owner gets to choose what kind of meant they serve. If they wanted to discriminate against particular customers, that would be an issue.
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Sorry, I guess that wasn’t very brief.
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No, actually it’s extremely helpful. Thank you! I should have known this was about the cake bakers again. I’m off my game in a serious way.
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Fascism in action. Some “Christians” have turned Jesus into a Monopoly Get-out-of-jail-free card. That is, you can say and do anything even if it goes directly against both logic and religious teaching (sometimes the two are aligned) as long as one professes belief.
It’s also the case that Indiana harbors Klansmen and Neo Nazis (unfortunately, the latter is true of most states)
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/neo-nazi/active_hate_groups
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“Some “Christians” have turned Jesus into a Monopoly Get-out-of-jail-free card. That is, you can say and do anything even if it goes directly against both logic and religious teaching (sometimes the two are aligned) as long as one professes belief.”
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And by the way, this is what is happens when the shoe is on the other foot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJaroR_qTNs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptgAKywiHG0
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Crud; they posted the full vids. Sorry Clarissa.
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@ Shadowofashade
Do you not understand that there’s a difference between refusing to make a cake that has Hebrew written on it* and and refusing all orders whatsoever from Jews?
*the baker has doesn’t speak Hebrew/cannot write it
Here is a more plain example – a vendor sells A, B, and C. Someone comes up and says “I would like to buy D please” “sorry, we don’t sell that”. – NOT discrimination because it has nothing to do with who the person is – it’s about the goods.
Now a new customer comes up and tried to order A, and the shopkeeper asks “Are you gay? Yes? No A for you then”. This is discrimination because the vendor sells A but only to straight customers. The sale of A is contingent on the customer’s identity which SHOULD be irrelevant to shop keepers.
That is why this is why ‘forcing Muslims to serve pork’ is not relevant to refusing service to all gay people.
Businesses are free to discriminate as the kinds of goods they serve e.g. we don’t sell pork, or penis cakes, or cakes with hate speech written on them. Businesses ARE NOT free to discriminate as to what kind of people the will serve – e.g. white people only.
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“Do you not understand that there’s a difference between refusing to make a cake that has Hebrew written on it* and and refusing all orders whatsoever from Jews?”
“Businesses are free to discriminate as the kinds of goods they serve e.g. we don’t sell pork, or penis cakes, or cakes with hate speech written on them. Businesses ARE NOT free to discriminate as to what kind of people the will serve – e.g. white people only.”
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“Businesses are free to discriminate as the kinds of goods they serve e.g. we don’t sell pork, or penis cakes, or cakes with hate speech written on them. Businesses ARE NOT free to discriminate as to what kind of people the will serve”
Ever heard of ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’? ‘No soliciting or loitering’? “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone?’ (this last one was found in the ghetto area in a major city). So apparently businesses CAN discriminate who they service (and the presence of security barriers at the exits to stores discriminate who has unpaid merchandise). Otherwise I should be able to buy alcohol without proving I’m over 21, prescription drugs without a prescription, and take things out of a store without proving I’ve paid for them.
Comparing the LGBT community to skin color is ludicrious. I can look at someone and tell their skin color; I can’t look at them and determine who they sleep with. To be perfectly honest, I don’t care to hear who or what you bed every night. I’ve noticed that LGBTs mention their ‘orientation’ over and over and over again (like a valley girl in her use of ‘so’ and ‘like’). Funny how the progressives howled at Bush the Younger, claiming that the government had no business in the bedroom, but insist on bringing the bedroom to the public square.
Per the official government case filed against the Christian bakers (http://media.oregonlive.com/business_impact/other/BOLI-sweetcakes.pdf), the business owner did not ask if they were gay, the complainants OFFERED the INFORMATION for writing on a cake (namely the names of the couple getting married). The complainants then took 6 MONTHS to file a complaint. Let me repeat that: 6 MONTHS to file a complaint. They couldn’t just go to another cake shop; they had to get revenge.
If the business owners had said something to the effect of “Get the f*** out of my shop before I smite you with the hammer of God and send you straight to h***” while grabbing a shotgun, I could honestly see a reason for filing charges.
Like I said, if you think your ‘rights’ are getting violated, try your requests at a mosque or in a Moslem country. Otherwise, the LGBT are no better than the Romanian communists who forced priests to serve Communion with urine and feces.
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Businesses aren’t churches, cake isn’t sacrament, asking for the newlyweds’ names to be written on a wedding cake isn’t flaunting “LGBT”-ness, and you should be deeply ashamed of yourself for having such an acute lack of sense of scale and proportion that you even dare link a cake lawsuit to torture in Romanian prisons in the ’50s. Unless you’re actually doing this for rhetorical effect, in which case, fuck you sideways.
Signed, a Romanian “LGBT” who lost a family member to that fucking regime, and had another family member (another “LGBT” for what it’s worth) barely make it out of those prisons. And yes, both of them were Christians.
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When was the last time LGBTs were imprisoned in America? Lynched? Put in the stockade? Horsewhipped through the streets at high noon? Cat got your tongue?
I have no problem with LGBTs; I have a problem with being told that I must kiss the ring / ‘join the Party’ / accept that which I know is morally unacceptable as truth or be jailed/fined/thrown into the lion pit.
You actually lived in a country that put a gun and the law to the heads of private citizens, and you seek to do the same to others? You are thrice the son of hell compared to the Romanian Communists.
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“You actually lived in a country that put a gun and the law to the heads of private citizens”
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From the same place as whips, stockades and cats getting the tongues of people who don’t want to google in shadie’s place, I guess. Dude (I assume) likes feeling persecuted and whips himself into a frenzy whenever given the slightest trigger. The actual content of the verbal frothing doesn’t really have any connection with any overarching argument, but goes from one image to another based only on association rules. Now that I think of it better, it’s pretty pointless getting upset at Markov chains, even if someone did include Wurmbrand’s book (or, most likely, a review of Wurmbrand’s book off a sensationalizing Christian website) in the training material.
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You never make a law that you’re not willing to kill someone over.
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So you are against Pence ‘ s bill, then? Because he’s willing to kill over it?
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This has to be the least Christian and most vicious post on here in a long time. A person has suffered personal loss from an inhuman system that you mentioned for no good reason and you go on the attack?
You are essentially a terrible human being. Whatever religion or ethical system you think you are following is not working for you.
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For Clarissa: That was meant for shadowofashade, I didn’t want excerpt the offensive part and hit the post comment button too soon.
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Ever heard of ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’? ‘No soliciting or loitering’? “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone?’ (this last one was found in the ghetto area in a major city). So apparently businesses CAN discriminate who they service (and the presence of security barriers at the exits to stores discriminate who has unpaid merchandise).
The first two are related to observable behaviors which can be stopped or changed easily. The third does not specify an identity.
Otherwise I should be able to buy alcohol without proving I’m over 21, prescription drugs without a prescription, and take things out of a store without proving I’ve paid for them.
All of these are violations of well established laws.
Volunteering the names of the people getting married is standard for wedding cake writing. By your standards, every woman who chit chats about their husband and sports a wedding ring and every dude who mentions “my wife” is hammering their heterosexuality into people’s faces.
The rest of your analogies are frankly silly. In your example they’d have a criminal action as a civil one (in Oregon anyways). Baking a cake is not the same as forcing priests to serve defiled communion wafers no matter how much you conflate it. All of the Catholic nuns who taught me must have missed that part about wedding cake baking being equivalent to transubstantiation.
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“The first two are related to observable behaviors which can be stopped or changed easily. The third does not specify an identity.”
Didn’t you know my religion is the “First Church of Nudity”? One of the core tenants central to the identity of a First Nudist is dining in the buff (like Adam and Eve). If a Muslim can wear a burqa to work (part of the core identity of a devout Muslim), then I have the dine in the nude, regardless of the backward opinions and tender scruples of the unenlightened fools around me.
“All of these are violations of well established laws.’
These law violate the core identities of my nudist core identity as well. My civil and religious rights must not be violated, and any messing with me will get a lawsuit! /sarc
“Volunteering the names…”
My point was the business owner was not asking if they are gay. Reading comprehension?
“Baking a cake is not the same as forcing priests to serve defiled communion…”
Marriage and euchrist are sacraments of the Catholic church (or did you sleep in that day?). Baking a cake FOR A WEDDING THAT YOU DO NOT BELIEVE IS VALID OR HOLY is considered defiling a sacrament.
Don’t tell me, you would be the person who go to a gentleman’s club, and later tell your priest that you were to spread the Good News to the strippers? /sarc
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shadowofashade: May I ask why you are so interested in the gay people? Just for my own curiosity. I’m not criticizing your interest, I’m just interested in the interest. 🙂
“Baking a cake FOR A WEDDING THAT YOU DO NOT BELIEVE IS VALID OR HOLY is considered defiling a sacrament.”
🙂 🙂 No, of course, it isn’t. 🙂 A cake is not a sacrament. 🙂
“If a Muslim can wear a burqa to work (part of the core identity of a devout Muslim),”
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Baking a cake is not the same as forcing priests to serve defiled communion…”
Marriage and euchrist are sacraments of the Catholic church (or did you sleep in that day?). Baking a cake FOR A WEDDING THAT YOU DO NOT BELIEVE IS VALID OR HOLY is considered defiling a sacrament.
Like many people who overspend, you’re confusing the ceremony with the reception. You’re also confusing Catholic sacramental marriage with legal marriage. Two baptized never married Catholics (a man and a woman) can have a Catholic wedding conducted by a Catholic priest and that makes them married in the eyes of the Catholic church. But they have to apply for a marriage license to be married in the eyes of the state. You’re right, I slept through the part where the baker and the priest declare the couple married. :))
Don’t tell me, you would be the person who go to a gentleman’s club, and later tell your priest that you were to spread the Good News to the strippers? /sarc
Wait, who was Mary Magdalene again? WWJD? He just might turn water into wine for the reception. 🙂 🙂 🙂
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Again, the nudist argument falls flat because to the restaurant, it’s not about your nudist religion, it’s about their rule that they apply to ALL CUSTOMERS. If the restaurant were really being discriminatory they would say “even if you’re wearing clothes, we don’t want you in here because you’re a nudist”.
If your religion mandates you eat at restaurants nude you’re shit out of luck because any religious beliefs that mandate others do special things for you aren’t protected. Making a wedding cake is a normal practice for a bakery, the gay couple aren’t asking for anything special – that’s why it’s discrimination.
Have you tried telling these gay people you know you don’t care who or what they bed but you’re just tired of hearing about it so frequently? It would be a win-win because they’ll get the hell away from you.
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Scattered thoughts:
The problem with religious exemptions is that it’s pretty much impossible to draw a line around just those cases a person thinks are reasonable and those that are too far out there. Controlled substances in religious ceremonies is one thing killing animals in religious ceremonies is quite another.
My libertarian leanings (though I’m not a libertarian) tend to say that business owners should be able to decline to provide non-essential services to whoever they want for any reason whatsoever. The problem is that it exposes just how many nasty assholes are spread throughout the population which is pretty discouraging.
I hesitate to descend into debates about cakes because frankly both sides seem kind of infantile and as they say, there’s no way to wrestle a pig and not get mud on yourself.
Anyway, I’ll also note that in modernity only the most retrograde and unpleasant forms of exclusionary middle eastern religions* (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) seem to be vigorous and/or rigorous enough to survive. The more reasonable varieties simply disappear are are washed out into pale generalized codes of ethics with no real spiritual dimension.
*exclusionary means that within the religious tradition you can’t practice other faiths. Religions from further East tend to be non-exclusionary in that worshippers often mix elements of different religions like the Buddhist woman I knew who had a Buddhist shrine in one room and what looked like a Buddhist shrine to Mary and Jesus (esp Mary) in another.
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I’m sure that there is a psychoanalytic explanation for this fixation on cakes – not the flower arrangements, nor the cutlery nor anything else – but I haven’t figured it out yet.
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Well, to be fair, if LGBT people decided to go to a Christian conservative engraver, for example, and asked him to engrave their same-sex names on some silverware or a bracelet or whatever, we might have exactly the same problem…
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There must be a reason why we only hear the words “cake” and “baker” in this context. You are right, why doesn’t the engraver issue come up? Or a clothes vendor who’s asked to sell two wedding dresses or two tuxedos to 2 brides or 2 grooms?
There is a million possibilities, yet it’s always a cake.
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The wedding cake is a synecdoche* of the couple. It often has their names on them and often little figurines of the couple. At some wedding receptions, the newly married couple cut the cake together and then feed each other cake. Sometimes they just smash cake in each other’s faces. After that, everyone is supposed to eat a slice of cake. Super traditional couples will freeze cake to eat it a year later.
I suppose people read all kinds of quasi Freudian things into this. Of course this isn’t as obviously gendered or a sexual performance as the garter removal, the money dance or bouquet toss. (blech).
And there just doesn’t seem to be as much agita over the couple’s first dance.
*Wedding cake, to me, is the most “meh” of desserts at a wedding.
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“I suppose people read all kinds of quasi Freudian things into this.”
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I am with Cliff here, and his libertarian leanings. Everyone should have the right to conduct business according to his or her moral principles, however ridiculous these principles might be. One the other hand, the clients who were denied service based on moral or religious or any other arguments should have the right to inform as broad audience as they deem necessary about the moral attitudes of the business, without any fears of legal repercussions from the business owners. So all other clients or potential clients could make informed decisions on if they want to support the business in question with their hard-earned dollars. The state or federal governments may try to influence the situation by denying state contracts to businesses that deny service to people not breaking any (civil, criminal, whatever, the point is – not religious) law. However, government should not be able to punish the businesses in any other ways. Separation of church and state for you.
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Correction: not “government may try” but “government must influence”. Because if the business owner is entitled to running business according to his beliefs, then I am entitled to not supporting him either directly or indirectly, via government paying him with my tax dollars.
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And what if a doctor refuses to treat a patient because of his “religion”? What if this is the only doctor in the area?
We are at a STATE university, and we cannot prevent a religious fanatic on campus from refusing service to students and preaching Jesus to them instead. Yes, the cake thing is silly but the problem is that the moment you allow these freaks to make an argument that some non-existent religion or morality mandates them to be visibly and publicly freakish, society will start disintegrating. Tomorrow a student will refuse to hand in homework because his “religion” forbids him. Then some idiot in the street will hurl a stone at me because his “religion” mandates him to do that.
A true separation of church and state would mean that religion would never be mentioned in any official or state-related context at all. Never. At all. That would be the perfect reality for me.
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Clarissa:
It’s very apparent that you and a lot of other people here on this thread don’t read the Bible. Ever read the story of the Good Samaritian, or the Old Testament where it tells you to help your enemy if he is stuck on the side of the road?
There’s a difference between a saving a person’s life and a participating (even by the proxy of baking a cake / engraving a ring / photography) in a ceremony I know is wrong. I honestly don’t care who sleeps with who. I will not be compelled by the government to do things / support things I know are wrong. The problem of the LGBT rights activist is that they insist everyone acknowledge their lifestyle is morally correct and acceptable, or you will be fined / jailed / thrown into the Coliseum. That’s the same system that you (and others) have direct experience with / escaped, right? That’s not freedom, is it?
By the way, two articles from Indianapolis about the bill: one from an supporter of same-sex marriage.
http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/readers/2015/03/07/indiana-needs-religious-freedom-legislation/24477303/
http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/2015/03/25/pete-heck-gay-rights-activists-christians-surrender-else/70427990/
And a fun quote from the second article:
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“It’s very apparent that you and a lot of other people here on this thread don’t read the Bible.”
“There’s a difference between a saving a person’s life and a participating (even by the proxy of baking a cake / engraving a ring / photography) in a ceremony I know is wrong.”
” I will not be compelled by the government to do things / support things I know are wrong.”
“LGBT rights activist is that they insist everyone acknowledge their lifestyle is morally correct and acceptable”
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“My libertarian leanings (though I’m not a libertarian) tend to say that business owners should be able to decline to provide non-essential services to whoever they want for any reason whatsoever. ”
So you’d be fine with restaurants refusing service to black people?
My thinking is that there’s no truly ‘private’ business. You’re still taking advantage of public roads that customers travel to come to your business, electricity and utilities provided by the government that allows you to function, and so on. And if you’re using (however basic) government services to run your company, you should be subject to government laws that forbid discrimination.
Now, if you create an island, build all the infrastructure from scratch, you’re free to discriminate to your heart’s content.
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“So you’d be fine with restaurants refusing service to black people?”
Well that didn’t take long.
In an ideal world, yeah, I’d be okay with it. But… in the particular case of the US in the 1960s it was a structural distortion that wasn’t going to get fixed by the magic hand of the market. It needed outside input (in the form of government) to rectify.
Notice I said ‘tend’ and specifically said I’m not an L-word (brrrrrr).
“if you’re using (however basic) government services to run your company, you should be subject to government laws that forbid discrimination”
In other words, if you have an open position you’d be fine with the government telling you who to hire?
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“Well that didn’t take long.”
What were you expecting? It is one thing to say vague sentences like ‘I support the right of business to do whatever they want’, and it’s quite another when you actually have to utter the words ‘I support the right of businesses to not serve black people’.
Also, note that I’m not creating a slippery-slope argument here. I’m not taking your argument to an improbable extreme. WHAT ABOUT SERVING BLACK PEOPLE, HUH?!! I mean, discriminating against racial minorities and gay people is LITERALLY why these discussions take place. There are businesses that actually want to do this but are prevented from doing so by the TYRANNICAL federal government. There’s no bakery that’s arguing for its god-given right to discriminate against people wearing blue shirts. Nope. It’s always minorities. And gays. Sometimes women.
So, your ‘Well, that didn’t take long’ doesn’t make much sense in that context. Of course that didn’t take long. Like if you removed discrimination laws, what would you think would happen more often? People being refused service for being black or gay? Or people being refused service for wearing the wrong colored shirt? Geat real, dude.
Also, in my last post I wasn’t specifically referring to you. Sorry. I know you don’t identify as libertarian.
“In other words, if you have an open position you’d be fine with the government telling you who to hire?”
I’d absolutely adhere to federal employment laws that govern hiring and firing of workers. That’s such a no-brainer.
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“So you’d be fine with restaurants refusing service to black people?”
-Well that didn’t take long
Actually, I’m not fine with it because the ideal world of a frictionless market where all players are equally well informed and able to act does not exist. And as a member of a capitalist society I say: fuck everyone who thinks my $100 isn’t worth as much as some other person’s $100, and fuck everyone who wants to enable a bunch of bigots to make my hundred dollars buy me shittier goods and services than the next person’s hundred dollars. So many of the same people who keep harping on socialism in every nook and cranny turn right around and support all these dumb “religious” exceptions that make capitalism actively shittier for large groups of people and never connect that’s maybe there’s a reason why not everybody’s on the” rah rah deregulated free market train.” And it’s not as much of a jump as you think: people used the Bible to justify slavery and the Mormon church didn’t find black people spiritually equal to white people until 1977.
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I have no idea how it all went into this irrelevant libertarian direction. The government here is represented by Mike Pence. He’s making new laws, enacting the Big Government power, etc . The libertarian stance would entail opposing him, not supporting. We gave very weird libertarians here who worship the Big Daddy government.
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In this thread? Because Cliff specifically linked the two:” My libertarian leanings (though I’m not a libertarian) tend to say that business owners should be able to decline to provide non-essential services to whoever they want for any reason whatsoever.”
Also this line of reasoning is endorsed by prominent self labeled libertarians like Peter Thiel, Ron Paul and Rand Paul. They don’t see it as Big Government vs everyone else. To them Big Government is the federal government and not the state government, and the victims (or people in need of protection) are the business owners, and not any subset of consumers.
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“They don’t see it as Big Government vs everyone else. To them Big Government is the federal government and not the state government, and the victims (or people in need of protection) are the business owners, and not any subset of consumers.”
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Hmmm… the reason why market is not in fact frictionless is exactly because people place their convictions above the belief in the primacy of the market. And I think that this is in general a good thing – living in society devoid of any principle other than market principle would be dreadful. But once we allow for personal convictions to play any role at all, it becomes complicated. Because then we have to evaluate which convictions are better than others, which are bigoted and which are not, etc. And then we have to face the possibility that the bigoted society may democratically enact the bigoted laws… Bigoted from our viewpoint, that is. When that happens, we have to make a choice – which of the founding principles of our society is more dear to us – personal freedom of choice, or non-discrimination, or market-related stuff. Most of us here, myself included, are all for government supporting non-discrimination because this is in line with our moral convictions. But then we have to be prepared that some other group, if numerous enough, could use the same government mechanisms to enforce some moral principles that we may not like… “Life starts at conception”, for example…
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