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Fair enough.

 Peregrine wrote:


Depends on exactly how they advocate. If they limit their advocacy to statements of their religion's beliefs then that's fine. If they start telling people how to vote or endorsing specific candidates then they've crossed the line into political activity and should lose their tax-exempt status. And note that this is already what the law says in theory, the US government is just incredibly bad about enforcing the law and won't even remove tax-exempt status from churches that openly say "we're breaking this law because we hate it".

So one would assume this line of logic would also, then, apply to labor unions?

I might be missing something here, but how are they related?

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
I might be missing something here, but how are they related?

You're missing the fact that they're both non-profits and if advocating for political means should remove one from their tax-exempt status, it should do so for all.

The OEA doesn't even try and hide it. They send out a special magazine every election season and provide a list of who members should vote for.

Unions don't pay taxes on their political activities.

Are they classified differently perhaps? Might explain why?

 cincydooley wrote:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
I might be missing something here, but how are they related?

You're missing the fact that they're both non-profits and if advocating for political means should remove one from their tax-exempt status, it should do so for all.

The OEA doesn't even try and hide it. They send out a special magazine every election season and provide a list of who members should vote for.

I'd agree with that, and we can start by removing the NRA's. The most grievous of offenders.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Are they classified differently perhaps? Might explain why?

They're all 501(c) organizations. Churches and charities are 501(c) 3 and Labor Unions are 501(c) 5.

If they're all non-profits, and all 501(c)'s, they should all be subject to the same expectations and governance.

Regulations were proposed in....2013 (?) to curtail the activism from the 4's (ACLU, NRA, AARP are the biggest ones I can think of) and there was question as to whether it should extend to 501(c) 5's as well.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

sirlynchmob wrote:


I'd agree with that, and we can start by removing the NRA's. The most grievous of offenders.

See my other comment. I'm not going to go into whether or not they're the "most grievous" offenders.

sirlynchmob wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
I might be missing something here, but how are they related?

You're missing the fact that they're both non-profits and if advocating for political means should remove one from their tax-exempt status, it should do so for all.

The OEA doesn't even try and hide it. They send out a special magazine every election season and provide a list of who members should vote for.

I'd agree with that, and we can start by removing the NRA's. The most grievous of offenders.

Whats this "we" stuff Canadian?

 Frazzled wrote:
Whats this "we" stuff Canadian?

You didn't realise that you were secretly Canadian? Don't you feel the call of the maple syrup, universal healthcare and the need to write all official documents in French?

 Frazzled wrote:

sirlynchmob wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
I might be missing something here, but how are they related?

You're missing the fact that they're both non-profits and if advocating for political means should remove one from their tax-exempt status, it should do so for all.

The OEA doesn't even try and hide it. They send out a special magazine every election season and provide a list of who members should vote for.

I'd agree with that, and we can start by removing the NRA's. The most grievous of offenders.

Whats this "we" stuff Canadian?

American living abroad is the term you're looking for.

 SilverMK2 wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Whats this "we" stuff Canadian?

You didn't realise that you were secretly Canadian? Don't you feel the call of the maple syrup, universal healthcare and the need to write all official documents in Spanish?

Corrected your typo. Are we saying the essential difference between Canada and Texas is what language their official documents are in?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

sirlynchmob wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

sirlynchmob wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
I might be missing something here, but how are they related?

You're missing the fact that they're both non-profits and if advocating for political means should remove one from their tax-exempt status, it should do so for all.

The OEA doesn't even try and hide it. They send out a special magazine every election season and provide a list of who members should vote for.

I'd agree with that, and we can start by removing the NRA's. The most grievous of offenders.

Whats this "we" stuff Canadian?

American living abroad is the term you're looking for.

Pics or it didn't happen.

ConanMan wrote:
So let me tell you:

MARRIAGE is a legal embodiment of a PHYSICAL reality namely that two parents WHO ARE ALWAYS a man and woman are ALWAYS the cause of a child, it is TRANSGENERATIONAL in that it anchors the responsibility of the family into a ceremony among peers, and the community itself helps hold it together and that that child is safest and best care for in every statistical analysis EVER done if both those parent s are together, legally protected to bring up a CHILD together, in one home, you cannot argue your way out of it, you can name call against it, squeeze stats, lie, make stuff up, be appalled all you want but you are going to convince a room filled with your own type of idiot if you do not take seriously all the other things I have mentioned.

In other words MARRIAGE is a legal mirror of a physical reality surrounding a BABY'S birth

The fact that owe cannot t even recognise this definition, and are incapable of agreeing what *IS* marriage any more - THAT IS the problem, because you who don't know will outnumber those that do to all our detriment

It's interesting that you perceive the rest of the world not sharing your personal opinion as the problem, rather than the problem being that certain people are trying to ram their definition of 'marriage' down everyone else's throats.


You can bang on about 'traditional values' all you want... but 'traditional values' are what resulted in women being confined to the kitchen and bedroom and unable to be functional members of society. 'Traditional values' are what resulted in generations of people turning a blind eye to children being beaten (because discipline is so important to raising good kids, amiright? Gimme an AMEN!). 'Traditional values' gave us segregation, slavery, exploitation of the lower classes, and a whole bunch of people sitting in churches paying lip service to a deity they don't know if they even believe in but, you know, it's the thing you do.

Values change as society's perception of right or wrong changes. Values that are based on nothing more than 'it's what we've always done' need to be pulled out and looked at occasionally, to determine if they're still actually relevant... or if we're actually all acting like horrible human beings in the name of 'tradition'.

And the simple fact is that in this day and age, (regardless of whether it ever actually was before (which it wasn't)) marriage is not about having children. Marriage is (as it was when the Christian church was just getting started, by the way) a legal joining of two people into one legal entity. Anything else you want to hang on it is up to you... but that is then your version of marriage, and you have no right to expect everyone else on the planet to follow your personal interpretation of how they should live their lives.

 SilverMK2 wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Whats this "we" stuff Canadian?

You didn't realise that you were secretly Canadian? Don't you feel the call of the maple syrup, universal healthcare and the need to write all official documents in French?

Thank you for this, Silver, it made my day (and Frazzled's response was pretty good, too!)

 insaniak wrote:

ConanMan wrote:
So let me tell you:

MARRIAGE is a legal embodiment of a PHYSICAL reality namely that two parents WHO ARE ALWAYS a man and woman are ALWAYS the cause of a child, it is TRANSGENERATIONAL in that it anchors the responsibility of the family into a ceremony among peers, and the community itself helps hold it together and that that child is safest and best care for in every statistical analysis EVER done if both those parent s are together, legally protected to bring up a CHILD together, in one home, you cannot argue your way out of it, you can name call against it, squeeze stats, lie, make stuff up, be appalled all you want but you are going to convince a room filled with your own type of idiot if you do not take seriously all the other things I have mentioned.

In other words MARRIAGE is a legal mirror of a physical reality surrounding a BABY'S birth

The fact that owe cannot t even recognise this definition, and are incapable of agreeing what *IS* marriage any more - THAT IS the problem, because you who don't know will outnumber those that do to all our detriment

It's interesting that you perceive the rest of the world not sharing your personal opinion as the problem, rather than the problem being that certain people are trying to ram their definition of 'marriage' down everyone else's throats.


You can bang on about 'traditional values' all you want... but 'traditional values' are what resulted in women being confined to the kitchen and bedroom and unable to be functional members of society. 'Traditional values' are what resulted in generations of people turning a blind eye to children being beaten (because discipline is so important to raising good kids, amiright? Gimme an AMEN!). 'Traditional values' gave us segregation, slavery, exploitation of the lower classes, and a whole bunch of people sitting in churches paying lip service to a deity they don't know if they even believe in but, you know, it's the thing you do.

Values change as society's perception of right or wrong changes. Values that are based on nothing more than 'it's what we've always done' need to be pulled out and looked at occasionally, to determine if they're still actually relevant... or if we're actually all acting like horrible human beings in the name of 'tradition'.

And the simple fact is that in this day and age, (regardless of whether it ever actually was before (which it wasn't)) marriage is not about having children. Marriage is (as it was when the Christian church was just getting started, by the way) a legal joining of two people into one legal entity. Anything else you want to hang on it is up to you... but that is then your version of marriage, and you have no right to expect everyone else on the planet to follow your personal interpretation of how they should live their lives.

Ka-ching!

Already read that a county clerk here in Texas is refusing to issue same sex marriage licenses on the grounds that they have the right to their freedom of religion. Denying someone government services based on religion (your's or their's) is a violation of the First Amendment, in my opinion. The entire point behind the freedom of religion aspect in the First Amendment is to guarantee that there will be no official state religion. Once you start using your religion to justify your actions/laws, then you are, by default, trying to establish a state religion.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
Already read that a county clerk here in Texas is refusing to issue same sex marriage licenses on the grounds that they have the right to their freedom of religion. Denying someone government services based on religion (your's or their's) is a violation of the First Amendment, in my opinion. The entire point behind the freedom of religion aspect in the First Amendment is to guarantee that there will be no official state religion. Once you start using your religion to justify your actions/laws, then you are, by default, trying to establish a state religion.

I read other localities in the South are backing out of printing marriage licences altogther. That's one way to deal with the change. Take your ball and go home.

If you're a government official and you can't carry out one of your primary functions due to religious objections, the professional thing to do is to resign and find another position that does not compromise your religious principles. These places are just begging for costly lawsuits.

 jasper76 wrote:

If you're a government official and you can't carry out one of your primary functions due to religious objections, the professional thing to do is to resign and find another position that does not compromise your religious principles. These places are just begging for costly lawsuits.

I thought the "professional" thing to do was to challenge them to a "ladder match"

I agree, although personally, if I were that person's supervisor, I'd be all "ohh, you publicly state that you ain't gonna do your job because of your relgion?? You got till first break to clear out yo' gak"

 Sienisoturi wrote:
You implied the casuation quite heavily though, or are you admitting that modern family model might be inferior to the old one, as the things might be better overall due to technology, which could have compensated for the worse family model. I do not know what you were arguing before, but from a quick look it appears that you were arguing simply about is the modern family model better or worse, and not about are things overall better or worse. Might be a misunderstanding though from you or me.

It was my first post, I hadn’t made any argument before then. And I wasn’t implying any causation between the two. I was merely pointing out the argument presented, that things were so much worse now because of the decline of marriage was factually wrong, because things aren’t so much worse now.

Exactly why things have been getting better is up for all kinds of debate, and personally I think marriage has nothing to do with it – both because other factors are so much important, and because I suspect the divorce rate is a pretty poor measure of marriage (there have always been a whole lot of kids born out of wedlock, and a lot of couples would separate but not legally divorce – I think single parent families weren’t that much less common than today).

Maybe I didn’t make that clear, or maybe you read more in to my post than was there. It doesn’t much matter, but hopefully now my point is clear.

I looked at this URL: https://dalrock.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/divorcesper1000marriedwomen1.png?w=640&h=385 and it doesn't seem like it could be very easily traced to its original source.

Ah, fair point, my bad But that said, do you really need the links and sources? That teen pregnancy, teen crime, drug use and most other indicators have been in consistent decline since the early to mid-90s is not controversial. Just google for five minutes and you’ll find dozens of charts and tables with the information I gave.

 cincydooley wrote:
While I agree with you in full, that's sadly not how it seems to work anymore in the United States.

I'm not sure the 'anymore' part there is necessary. The US just has a much stronger activist culture than elsewhere, and especially more than in Australia.

This is a good thing and a bad thing. On gay marriage, for instance, there’s vastly more popular support for it Australia than in the US, but while you’ve gone through loads of state referendums and laws passed and rejected, finally culminating in the SC decision to establish it nationwide, here in Australia we’ve done nothing. Something like 70 to 80% of Australians believe it should exist, but after we say it we just go back to talking about home renovations and The Voice.

FWIW, Catholic Churches in Cincinnati are incredibly strict about their wedding policies. Most of them have, at minimum, a 6 month "member of the parish" requirement, in addition to the requirements of pre-Cana, multiple meetings with the priest, etc.

Yeah, that is similar to our experience with the first couple of churches we went to. The third place we tried, though, the priest was a former missionary, and explained to us that compared to the real work done there, he didn’t care much for the formal rules of the church. He still wanted us to meet him a few times, and he wanted to ensure our children would be raised Catholic, and he even gave a fairly half-hearted attempt to convert me


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/07/single_motherhood_worse_for_children_.html

According to this, which I know is Slate, and not really a "peer reviewed, industry standard" academic publication, income levels actually do not matter much at all in regards to the odds of children of single-parent households becoming a part of "the system"

Thanks for posting that, it was an excellent read. I won’t go as far as saying it’s changed my opinion, but it’s certainly changed it, made it less extreme. It was interesting to see the article mention the split in approach between college and non-college educated people – it’s an observation I’ve read a fair bit about and even raised on dakka a few times, but something I didn’t actually factor in to my thinking on the overall impact of marriage. Which was a weird oversight.

However, I do agree with you that economic "freedom" and income are probably the biggest factor in nearly any crime statistics, and not just whether we're looking at where a criminal "comes from"

It’s the economy, stupid


Automatically Appended Next Post:

ConanMan wrote:
The number of single parent households is steadily climbing NOT dropping. God only knows where you dragged up your graphs, because they aren't measuring the right thing that's for sure

You didn’t actually look at the graphs, did you? Didn’t even read the titles? If you had, you’d have learned they measure the rates of various metrics used to measure dysfunctional and delinquent teen behaviour – crime, drug use, teen pregnancy etc. And all of those measures show a decline in negative behaviour. As such your argument that a decline in marriage is leading to a decline in society becomes fantasy, because there is no decline in society.

I am sick to the back teeth of people wading into a debate they simply have no part in how many people on this post are even married? How many have done youth work? How many work with at risk young people?

Yes, yes and yes. And, interesting story, the work I did with young people was through my cousin’s church, and directly led to me having very negative, unfair opinions of the church for a long time afterwards.

The fact that owe cannot t even recognise this definition, and are incapable of agreeing what *IS* marriage any more - THAT IS the problem, because you who don't know will outnumber those that do to all our detriment

Doctrine will provide a single, certain and unchanging definition. That’s kind of the point of doctrine, but that doesn’t make the definition true or useful.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
Already read that a county clerk here in Texas is refusing to issue same sex marriage licenses on the grounds that they have the right to their freedom of religion. Denying someone government services based on religion (your's or their's) is a violation of the First Amendment, in my opinion. The entire point behind the freedom of religion aspect in the First Amendment is to guarantee that there will be no official state religion. Once you start using your religion to justify your actions/laws, then you are, by default, trying to establish a state religion.

Ultimately I see that as no different to an ultra-orthodox Jew refusing to work on Saturday, when they're employed as a football umpire or some other jobs that really needs them working on Saturday.

They're free to have their religious opinion, but if it means they can't do the job, then they don't keep doing the job. There needn’t be any malice in letting them go, but they have to go.

Gay marriage = gay weddings = wedding cakes = more wedding cakes for me
IF you are against gay marriages, the by associative property, you are against cake. Which makes you a heathen.

religion, children, and family have nothing to do with gay marriage.

A wedding is a religious ceremony. Priests can, and should, deny their services to couples they do not see fitting in with their religion.

A marriage certificate however is a legal contract that gives the parties involved certain rights and privileges to each others stuff when alive and after their partner dies. Also it effects your taxes.

A gay couple has every right that a strait one does to spend their life with someone with all the legal ramifications that a strait person does. Whether or not kids end up involved has no bearing on their ability to do so. Whether or not they choose to have a ceremony and/or how also has nothing to do with it.

The only question is "If two people choose to spend their lives together are they entitled to the same legal status as others regardless of their biology?" The supreme court voted yes.

Lance845 wrote:
A wedding is a religious ceremony.

A religious wedding is a religious ceremony.

My wedding had nothing whatsoever to do with religion.

 sebster wrote:

 Sienisoturi wrote:
You implied the casuation quite heavily though, or are you admitting that modern family model might be inferior to the old one, as the things might be better overall due to technology, which could have compensated for the worse family model. I do not know what you were arguing before, but from a quick look it appears that you were arguing simply about is the modern family model better or worse, and not about are things overall better or worse. Might be a misunderstanding though from you or me.

It was my first post, I hadn’t made any argument before then. And I wasn’t implying any causation between the two. I was merely pointing out the argument presented, that things were so much worse now because of the decline of marriage was factually wrong, because things aren’t so much worse now.

Exactly why things have been getting better is up for all kinds of debate, and personally I think marriage has nothing to do with it – both because other factors are so much important, and because I suspect the divorce rate is a pretty poor measure of marriage (there have always been a whole lot of kids born out of wedlock, and a lot of couples would separate but not legally divorce – I think single parent families weren’t that much less common than today).

Maybe I didn’t make that clear, or maybe you read more in to my post than was there. It doesn’t much matter, but hopefully now my point is clear.

I looked at this URL: https://dalrock.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/divorcesper1000marriedwomen1.png?w=640&h=385 and it doesn't seem like it could be very easily traced to its original source.

Ah, fair point, my bad But that said, do you really need the links and sources? That teen pregnancy, teen crime, drug use and most other indicators have been in consistent decline since the early to mid-90s is not controversial. Just google for five minutes and you’ll find dozens of charts and tables with the information I gave.

 cincydooley wrote:
While I agree with you in full, that's sadly not how it seems to work anymore in the United States.

I'm not sure the 'anymore' part there is necessary. The US just has a much stronger activist culture than elsewhere, and especially more than in Australia.

This is a good thing and a bad thing. On gay marriage, for instance, there’s vastly more popular support for it Australia than in the US, but while you’ve gone through loads of state referendums and laws passed and rejected, finally culminating in the SC decision to establish it nationwide, here in Australia we’ve done nothing. Something like 70 to 80% of Australians believe it should exist, but after we say it we just go back to talking about home renovations and The Voice.

FWIW, Catholic Churches in Cincinnati are incredibly strict about their wedding policies. Most of them have, at minimum, a 6 month "member of the parish" requirement, in addition to the requirements of pre-Cana, multiple meetings with the priest, etc.

Yeah, that is similar to our experience with the first couple of churches we went to. The third place we tried, though, the priest was a former missionary, and explained to us that compared to the real work done there, he didn’t care much for the formal rules of the church. He still wanted us to meet him a few times, and he wanted to ensure our children would be raised Catholic, and he even gave a fairly half-hearted attempt to convert me


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/07/single_motherhood_worse_for_children_.html

According to this, which I know is Slate, and not really a "peer reviewed, industry standard" academic publication, income levels actually do not matter much at all in regards to the odds of children of single-parent households becoming a part of "the system"

Thanks for posting that, it was an excellent read. I won’t go as far as saying it’s changed my opinion, but it’s certainly changed it, made it less extreme. It was interesting to see the article mention the split in approach between college and non-college educated people – it’s an observation I’ve read a fair bit about and even raised on dakka a few times, but something I didn’t actually factor in to my thinking on the overall impact of marriage. Which was a weird oversight.

However, I do agree with you that economic "freedom" and income are probably the biggest factor in nearly any crime statistics, and not just whether we're looking at where a criminal "comes from"

It’s the economy, stupid


Automatically Appended Next Post:

ConanMan wrote:
The number of single parent households is steadily climbing NOT dropping. God only knows where you dragged up your graphs, because they aren't measuring the right thing that's for sure

You didn’t actually look at the graphs, did you? Didn’t even read the titles? If you had, you’d have learned they measure the rates of various metrics used to measure dysfunctional and delinquent teen behaviour – crime, drug use, teen pregnancy etc. And all of those measures show a decline in negative behaviour. As such your argument that a decline in marriage is leading to a decline in society becomes fantasy, because there is no decline in society.

I am sick to the back teeth of people wading into a debate they simply have no part in how many people on this post are even married? How many have done youth work? How many work with at risk young people?

Yes, yes and yes. And, interesting story, the work I did with young people was through my cousin’s church, and directly led to me having very negative, unfair opinions of the church for a long time afterwards.

The fact that owe cannot t even recognise this definition, and are incapable of agreeing what *IS* marriage any more - THAT IS the problem, because you who don't know will outnumber those that do to all our detriment

Doctrine will provide a single, certain and unchanging definition. That’s kind of the point of doctrine, but that doesn’t make the definition true or useful.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
Already read that a county clerk here in Texas is refusing to issue same sex marriage licenses on the grounds that they have the right to their freedom of religion. Denying someone government services based on religion (your's or their's) is a violation of the First Amendment, in my opinion. The entire point behind the freedom of religion aspect in the First Amendment is to guarantee that there will be no official state religion. Once you start using your religion to justify your actions/laws, then you are, by default, trying to establish a state religion.

Ultimately I see that as no different to an ultra-orthodox Jew refusing to work on Saturday, when they're employed as a football umpire or some other jobs that really needs them working on Saturday.

They're free to have their religious opinion, but if it means they can't do the job, then they don't keep doing the job. There needn’t be any malice in letting them go, but they have to go.

I think that most people understand there is a difference between being compelled to do something that is a personal sin -- for example, orthodox Jew working on the Sabbath -- and doing something that facilitates other people to do something that you feel would be a sin if you did it personally.

For example, imagine you as a Christian do not believe in Hindu marriage, since you do not believe in Hindu religion. But you are a government clerk whose job it is to register other people's marriages. It is not a religious function. If the marriage is from a different religion to yours, that is not your personal sin to register it, and you do not need to be concerned about it.

 RiTides wrote:

 SilverMK2 wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Whats this "we" stuff Canadian?

You didn't realise that you were secretly Canadian? Don't you feel the call of the maple syrup, universal healthcare and the need to write all official documents in French?

Thank you for this, Silver, it made my day (and Frazzled's response was pretty good, too!)

In that case we need to celebrate the national holiday of our forefathers - Canada Day is today!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

These places are just begging for costly lawsuits.

Which is what will happen. refusals are temporary until the first letters from lawyers/ACLU.

I think that most people understand there is a difference between being compelled to do something that is a personal sin -- for example, orthodox Jew working on the Sabbath -- and doing something that facilitates other people to do something that you feel would be a sin if you did it personally.

For example, imagine you as a Christian do not believe in Hindu marriage, since you do not believe in Hindu religion. But you are a government clerk whose job it is to register other people's marriages. It is not a religious function. If the marriage is from a different religion to yours, that is not your personal sin to register it, and you do not need to be concerned about it.

Why mind your own business and do the job you're being paid to do, when there's a perfect chance to publicly exercise your persecution complex, and maybe even get your 15 minutes on Fox News?

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Gay marriage = gay weddings = wedding cakes = more wedding cakes for me
IF you are against gay marriages, the by associative property, you are against cake. Which makes you a heathen.

Now that's something we can all agree on.

I thought by now everyone was aware that the cake is a lie.

 Frazzled wrote:

Which is what will happen. refusals are temporary until the first letters from lawyers/ACLU.

Maybe I'm being hopelessly optimistic here, but I don't actually think there'll be all that many lawsuits over this.

And with SSM being "The Law" now, those groups who have lawyers will quickly change their policies and have them posted fairly quickly (ie, a bakery that doesn't wish to support gay marriage may have a sign that reads: "No Wedding Cakes, period") otherwise, they will be quick to have their bylaws changed to support it, such as various churches and religious institutions.

Actually several states have already enacted religious freedom laws such that businesses won't have to do business based on religious grounds.

As a government manager, if I had an employee cite a sincere religious belief as a reason he cannot perform an aspect of his job duties, I would likely work with that employee. There is a balancing act between the rights of an employee, and the rights of the public and the need for good public service. In the end, while I would certainly try to have other employees cover that task, if an employee won't perform an essential job duty for religious reasons and that leads to a lapse in public service, I think the employee has to suck it up.

From a managment background, we do everyting we can not to interfere with an individuals religion. We don't require Jews or Seventh Day adventists to work on Saturdays, we allow any religious displays, garb, or practice in the employees own space. However, allowing an employee to refuse a task, not because the task itself is against their religion, but because what the task accomplishes is against their beliefs, opens all kinds of cans of worms.

What happens when a clerk refuses to deny welfare benefits, because as a christrian its her duty to care for the needy? What happens when a Jewish or Muslim food inspector refuses to go into pork processing plants?

I get that this is just grandstanding, and it'll blow over, but shining a spotlight will actually make it harder for government managers to covertly accomodate religious freedom. This is why we can't have nice things.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Frazzled wrote:
Actually several states have already enacted religious freedom laws such that businesses won't have to do business based on religious grounds.

The fallout from those is going to be awful.

I feel like explaining, slowly and carefully, to every small business owner that wants to deny gay people service: you still can. You just can't do it openly.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to successfully sue a business for discrimination if they aren't overt about it? Yes, you may need to add a step, and you may need to cover your tracks, but there are so many ways to dodge taking jobs you don't want to do when your a small business.