Toe the Line: College Republicans | Personal freedoms, public conciliations and discrimination

Debating the Religious Freedom Restoration Act

By Carter Skeel 04/14/15 9:55pm

What those who decry — with religious zeal, I might add — Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act seem to ignore is that these issues involve a balancing of rights. This act would not give license for anyone to comprehensively discriminate against entire groups. And no religion I know of prescribes such actions.

The most common cases involve gay marriage ceremonies. Let’s consider the balance of rights here. On one side is a person’s fundamental right to freedom of religion. On the other is a couple’s right to purchase goods in the market. Ruling against the religious person would narrow her available choices to one: She must serve the gay couple. Siding with the gay couple would narrow their choices by one: They could patronize any other establishment they wanted. The former case — I’m borrowing from Hayek here — is a far more coercive limitation on liberty.

Opposing this law shows a fundamental disregard for every individual’s right to define her own conception of the good. There are many cases in which most of us would think it justifiable to refuse service. If a neo-

Nazi group wanted someone to cater a party for them, I don’t think anyone would fault her for refusing. I am certainly not equating gay couples to neo-Nazis, but rather establishing the precedent that refusing service is justified in certain cases. This case generates almost universal agreement, while of course the gay marriage case does not. But the immorality of gay marriage is a part of many citizens’ conceptions of the good; a fundamental feature of democracy is accepting that others have different views from you. Yet, returning to my opening idea, this does not grant comprehensive license to anyone. This is where the balancing comes in.

There is an underlying hypocrisy here. Homosexuals, having been attacked and closeted, cry for respect and recognition. Yet many opponents of RFRA advocate attacking and closeting another group of people for their views. How can people who have experienced real discrimination for their beliefs want to persecute others for theirs? Lest you think I’m being alarmist, consider the many recent examples. Brendan Eich, for instance, was incited to resign as CEO of Mozilla for a $1,000 donation he made in support of banning gay marriage in 2008. Many in academia live in fear of being “found out” as anti-gay marriage and being denied tenure. I could go on, but you can look up more examples for yourself.

We must not sacrifice fundamentally protected constitutional rights at the altar of self-righteous indignation.

— Carter Skeel

C ‘15

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