"Save Religious Freedom!" (Update, Update II)

That's the new version of Anita Bryant's "Save the Children!" campaign from the 1970s, and it's having the same effect on gay-inclusive civil rights legislation. The call is coming from the usual suspects -- the Catholic bishops, the "family" organizations (if you've ever checked out their websites, you discover very quickly that almost none of them have any programs of their own to help families -- in most cases, the best you're going to come up with are links to other organizations), the watchdogs to preserve "Christian" supremacy. As far as I'm concerned, these demands for "religious" exemptions to marriage laws, and now ENDA, are pretty much superfluous -- there's no way you can force a church or minister to officiate or host and same-sex wedding if it's against their doctrine -- and, as they grow broader, pernicious.

There are limits on rights and freedoms -- otherwise, society doesn't work. It can't, at least not the kind of society we have here. If one group or person has unlimited rights, unlimited freedom, that's dictatorship. That's what the "Christian" right is after.

Michelangelo Signorile has a good piece up at HuffPo examining this issue in relation to ENDA. The key point:

But ENDA has a problem: a disturbing religious exemption that has been included in the bill in one form or another ever since it was first introduced in 1994 -- light years ago in terms of the speed of LGBT progress -- and by gay advocates themselves, to appease conservative, religious Democrats and Republicans. In that regard, they haven't updated ENDA for 2013. And really, the exemption should never have been in this civil rights legislation in first place, as The New York Times pointed out in an editorial this week:

The exemption would extend beyond churches and other houses of worship to any religiously affiliated institution, like hospitals and universities, and would allow those institutions to discriminate against people in jobs with no religious function, like billing clerks, cafeteria workers and medical personnel. The exemption -- which was inserted to appease some opponents who say the act threatens religious freedom -- is a departure from the approach of earlier civil rights laws.

So a Catholic school teacher who's done a great job for years could still be fired under ENDA if the school's principal discovers that she is a lesbian.

That's already happening -- and not just in red states like Arkansas -- it's also happened in Minnesota and in California. The message here is clear -- stay in the closet if you want to keep your job.

(There's a related issue here, of course -- how much of your life is your employer's business? That's a really broad one, and I'm not going to deal with it here, but keep it in mind -- it's important, if for no other reason than that it stems from the same sort of authoritarian mindset we're seeing in the "religious exemption" claims.)

One can only hope that the overreach on this will come sooner rather than later -- and there will be overreach. I'm waiting for the first lawsuit alleging that the "religious" exemptions in a gay or trans civil rights law violate someone's religious freedom. After all, what sauce for the goose. . . .

Update: Here's another discussion of the "religious" exemptions from Ari Ezra Waldman at Towleroad, with some reference to the position of our "advocacy groups" on the issue:

According to BuzzFeed's Chris Geidner, spokespersons for the Human Rights Campaign, Freedom to Work, and the ACLU all had the same basic response: Senator Portman's amendment is "unnecessary." The ACLU went a bit further in its conversations with Mr. Geidner, mentioning that the exemption in ENDA would be "unprecedented." But despite some groups, like the ACLU, raising concerns about the religious exemptions, Chris Johnson of the Washington Blade shows us that there is simply no urgency, no stomach for a fight over the religious exemptions. Our community's goal, Mr. Johnson discovers, is merely to raise the issue. The ACLU told Mr. Johnson that "it’s certainly [their] hope more and more pro-equality members of Congress and their staff will come to understand the potential harm of the current exemption."

That's it?

HRC, Freedom to Work, and ACLU leaders are engaging in the art of the possible. ENDA needs 60 votes to pass. To get sixty votes, it needs Republicans. To get a sufficient number of those Republicans, it needs to pay homage to religious liberty. To fight against that political reality is at once silly and dangerous to the organizations' future influence.

But no one is talking about what today's cavalier approach will mean for tomorrow's fights.

Needless to say, that approach seems to me, as it does to Waldman, both short-sighted and eventually harmful. What needs to be done it to characterize those religious exemptions as overly broad and infringing on the rights of others -- an attempt at religious supremacy.

Update II: Zack Ford has a pretty devastating run-down on the US Catholic Bishop's objections to ENDA. The Bishops, of course, don't believe in "unjust" discrimination, but their discrimination against LGBTs is just. Just ask them.