Posted on 02/18/2014 8:05:47 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Conservatives keep trying to use America's religious freedom as a way to limit everyone else's rights.
Last week, the Kansas House of Representatives passed a bill (pdf) that would have broadly legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians. Luckily, after national outrage, the bill was halted. But the fight isn't over: the bill's reliance on religious freedom to justify discrimination is a sign of right-wing efforts to come.
The bill's scope was impressive in its expansiveness: Kansans would have been able to legally refuse to provide just about any service to anyone whose relationship they dislike for religious reasons, and could have refused to provide services "related to" any relationship they dislike for religious reasons. The bill specifically enumerated adoption, foster care, counseling, social services, employment and employment benefits, as well as the general categories of "services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges", as permissible areas for discrimination.
In other words, under the bill, any individual Kansan could have hung a "No Gays, No Lesbians, No Dogs" sign on the door of his restaurant. Any individual Kansan could have refused to hire someone, serve someone a drink, rent someone an apartment, sell someone a pair of pants or accommodate someone at a hotel if that someone is gay. Any employer could even have refused to extend insurance coverage to a gay employee's husband or wife if he thinks same-sex marriage is wrong. Even government employees paid with everyone's tax dollars would have had carte blanche to discriminate social workers don't have to work with gay couples, police officers don't have to come to the assistance of a gay person in need....
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
These whiners don’t know how good they’ve got it here. In countries controlled by that other religion, a girl can be stoned to death for having a Facebook page.
Sure...the Christians are warped.....never mind the fudge packers.....how the hell did we get to this????
Not yet—but they can send their private army Either the gay activists —or the ACLU and it’s umbrella of anti-American activists in to threaten a long and costly legal case where the Christian can expect to go before a hostile and anti-Christian Judge.
Does Spok remember American history—how same sex behavior/Sodomy was a Crime of Infamy worthy of death. When the First Amendment protections applied only to Christians? — When Marriage was defined by the Courts as the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of Matrimony-when the Rights of Conscience were protected by Law — and Sundays under our US Constitution and by Law a Dies Non —When congress was not ashamed to petition the President to proclaim National Days of Prayer and Thanksgiving-and/or National Days of Humiliation ,Fasting ,and Prayer as the situation merited.Does this Gay Activist of the Gaurdian know anything about American history?Or is she a product of American Progressive Education?
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Public Accommodations Act of 1964 (part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) as a valid exercise of Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce, on the theory that racial discrimination in hotels and restaurants in the south limited the ability of blacks to travel to those states.
The commerce clause has been used to perpetuate more unconstitutional crap than any other words in the Constitution.
Freedom of association is a basic freedom.
In personal matters, certainly. In business, not so clear; even at English common law, certain businesses (inns, ferry boats, stagecoaches) were required to serve "any peaceable subject of the King" who paid the posted rate.
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