Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Social Evolution
Friday, April 03, 2015 by Jonathan R. Gibbons inIndiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) (Indiana 119th… 2015) provides a private business owner with a legal defense for discriminating against individuals if it conflicts with their religious beliefs. As Jonathan Cohn of the liberal Huffington Post explains, “The goal is to give business owners a stronger legal defense if they refuse to serve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender customers and want to cite their faith as justification for their actions” (Cohn, 2015). Likewise, Jonah Goldberg of the conservative National Review explains, “If someone feels their religious rights have been violated, they can go to court and make their case. That’s it.” (Goldberg 2015). They’ve both essentially come to the same synopsis of the RFRA. One outcome of the RFRA is clear: it provides private business owners with a legal defense to discriminate based on religious grounds.
Issues like these are where intellectually consistent libertarians run into problems with liberals. Should a privately-owned business have the right to refuse service to someone? Yes. Presumably most Americans would agree depending on the reasons why the service is being refused. Therein resides the crux of the various contentions surrounding laws which permit, whether explicitly or implicitly, discrimination by private business owners. When should private business discrimination be permitted under the law?
If a well known Ku Klux Klan (KKK) member is refused service by a black business owner, most would likely agree that this is fine. If a strip club owner refused to hire a morbidly obese dancer, or an amputee, most would probably agree that this was acceptable discrimination. Now a liberal will argue that all of these latter examples, save for the amputee, involve discrimination against people who have a choice in creating their own circumstances. They would be correct.
What would happen if a business put up a sign like this today? The Civil Rights Act prohibited both private-business segregation and public segregation.Perhaps the law should dictate that we only discriminate not based on unchangeable characteristics of one’s core being, but rather as Martin Luther King Jr. explained, “…by the content of their character.” An obnoxious drunk get’s thrown out of a bar. This would be acceptable discrimination. Renowned Atheist Richard Dawkins walks into a Hobby Lobby and management refuses to serve him. This would be acceptable discrimination. A Muslim store owner refuses to serve a Catholic priest who just published a book ridiculing Islam. This would be acceptable discrimination. Known homosexual couples walk into a bar and are refused service. There’s a sign that says, “No gays allowed.” This would not be acceptable just as it wasn’t acceptable during segregation to turn away black customers. The truest definition of discrimination, then, is a prejudice towards an individual based on core aspects of their being which cannot be changed, in other words their race, gender, sexuality, and other physical characteristics.
But what happens when a homosexual couple demands that a devout Catholic wedding photographer provide them with service for their upcoming wedding. Ahh… here is where things get complicated and this is indeed an issue that went to court. As both Goldberg and Cohn discuss:
The war for gay rights has been won, and that’s basically fine by me. But there are a few holdouts — most famously devout Christian wedding planners, florists, photographers, and bakers — who don’t want to be part of such things. Why a gay couple would want a photographer who is morally opposed to their wedding to snap pictures of it is a mystery to me. (Goldberg 2015)
In a now-famous case, a gay couple sued a photographer who refused to take pictures at a same-sex marriage ceremony… The photographer cited the state’s religious freedom law as a defense. (Cohn, 2015)
I ask liberals: what’s wrong with this? Why should someone be forced to provide services to someone they so strongly do not want to provide services to? Why should they be penalized in a court of law for their personal beliefs? And as Goldberg asked, why in the hell would the customer want their services in the first place? This delves into a much deeper problem with involving the government in such private matters.
When the Civil Rights Act (CRA) was passed it abolished decades of government promoted discrimination by ridding American society of public segregation. Public bathrooms, transportation vehicles, parks, and schools, were no longer segregated. Government had previously taken an active role in promoting discrimination. The CRA abolished these practices but it also required that privately-owned businesses no longer discriminate as well. So the government went from promoting public discrimination, to promoting private tolerance. Either way the government remained involved in artificial social evolution. This is where libertarians get pissed off and where we infuriate liberals.
Liberal Rachel Maddow and libertarian Rand Paul got into a heated debate over this back in 2010. When Paul argued that he didn’t like the private aspect of the CRA, Maddow pressured him to admit that a private business should, then, have the right to put up segregation signs again. Paul dodged the question as it was clearly a cleverly constructed trap by the liberal media to try and destroy Paul. One of the complicating problems within this debate is that many privately owned businesses are open and accessible to the public through publicly maintained roads, they’re protected by public law enforcement, and they’re guarded by legal benefits that protect them from certain legal actions. In other words, many storefront businesses are more quasi-private than absolutely private, but a sole-proprietor wedding photographer or caterer is about as private as it can get when it comes to a business. They have the right to refuse service to anyone they wish.
The problem with forcing positive social change is that such change is more effective and long-lasting when it occurs naturally and not through the force of government. You cannot force someone to stop being racist anymore than you can stop bigots from projecting their sexual insecurities through hatred of open-homosexuals; if anything using force will only amplify the problem. The government cannot force private business owners to not be racist or homophobic; only painstaking time and social progress can filter out the majority of these grotesque aspects of society. In other words, the painstaking time that it would have taken private businesses to start serving blacks would have taken longer without the CRA’s private elements, but the ultimate result may have been a society that had become naturally tolerant and not forced into tolerance artificially. Forcing a restaurant owner to serve homosexuals is not going to make them tolerant of homosexuals, but when the society boycotts the business and comes together in outrage, it impacts other business owners to change their ways. This creates a roller coaster ride of positive social change and cooperation that pummels over the society until all that remains of bigotry and racism are the fringe residues that come together to form esoteric clubs and secret societies with minuscule memberships and laughable public reputations (KKK and Pray the Gay Away Camp).
In the end, the RFRA is a bad law because it’s vague and creates more social tension; it does not promote discrimination ostensibly, but its subtext reeks of prejudice. But forcing a devout Catholic wedding photographer to take photos at a homosexual wedding is also bad law. Any artificial government-induced social tolerance and progress is just that, artificial. It doesn’t cure society of the disease, it just suppresses it. We should have more faith in humanity and American society that it will shun bigots, racists, and work to enlighten the ignorant, rather than depend on the use of force to invoke these healthy social changes. If a little pizzeria in the middle of no where refuses to serve homosexuals, then so be it. Don’t eat there and I won’t either (they probably have terrible pizza anyway). Now if the government wants to provide marriage contracts to heterosexuals but not homosexuals, then we have a problem; that’s government discrimination and a clear violation of the 14th Amendment.
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Sources:
Cohn, Jonathan. 2015. “Why Indiana’s Religious Freedom Law Is Such A Big Deal.” Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/01/indiana-religious-freedom_n_6984156.html
Goldberg, Jonah. 2015. “Indiana’s Law Is Not the Return of Jim Crow”. National Review. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416248/indianas-law-not-return-jim-crow-jonah-goldberg
Indiana 119th General Assembly First Regular Session. 2015. “Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” https://iga.in.gov/static-documents/9/2/b/a/92bab197/SB0101.05.ENRS.pdf
