For Government Bullies, It's All About Coercion

The following is an excerpt from an article in Organization Trends: 

In the debate over state religious freedom laws, gay marriage isn’t really the issue.

For the Left, nothing is ever worthwhile until it’s connected to coercion. That’s why a vast collection of progressive organizations, many bankrolled by billionaire financier George Soros, joined to pile on Indiana and other religious freedom advocates.  None of the political or corporate response would have come without progressive groups stirring up alarm.
 

Oregon Capitol (Credit:Oregon.gov)

The assertion that a state religious freedom law is somehow an “excuse” for a state legislature to pass laws protecting business owners ignores the fact that sincerely held religious beliefs are being crushed under the despotic boot of government. Religious freedom laws are not a solution in search of a problem. They’re a response to a clear and present danger.

In late April, Oregon Administrative Law Judge Alan McCullough ordered Aaron and Melissa Klein, owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa bakery in Portland to pay $135,000 in damages to a gay couple for emotional suffering caused by the bakery’s not catering their wedding.

In New Mexico, the case of Elane Photography v. Willock began when a lesbian couple asked to have their commitment ceremony photographed. When Elane Photography declined, the couple made a complaint to the New Mexico Human Rights Commission. New Mexico has a RFRA law, but the Human Rights Commission refused to apply it to a business in the state, so litigation ensued.

During a Colorado Civil Rights Commission meeting on Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips’s decision to refuse to bake a wedding cake, commissioner Diann Rice said, “Freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust … we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use … their religion to hurt others.”  The commission went so far as to order “reeducation” as a potential remedy.

That was too much for Richard Epstein, a New York University law professor who supports same-sex marriage: “The Colorado Commission made the grotesque and inexcusable comparison of the refusal to do business in a highly competitive market with the mass extermination of helpless individuals in government gas chambers,” wrote Epstein.

“Commissioner Rice’s insistence that Cakemasters has used its religion to ‘hurt others’ means that anyone who turns a person down for business ‘hurts’ that person. Her formulation shows no appreciation whatsoever for the relative harms involved in these low-level commercial interactions. Craig [the plaintiff suing Cakemasters] has dozens of alternative outlets clamoring for his business. Phillips and Elane Photography don’t have that luxury; they are now put to the impossible choice of closing down or violating their religious beliefs.”