After the Veto by Linda Greenhouse

[elleng]

Once Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona yielded to the country’s political, business and sports establishment last week and vetoed the nasty measure known as S.B. 1062, the furor died down. The bill would have offered a legal defense for business owners who claim a religious reason for failing to abide by nondiscrimination laws in their dealings with the public. But the question remains what lesson to draw from the outcome of this particular effort to privilege claims of religious conscience over the general societal principle of nondiscrimination.

For years now, the religious right and its political allies, for example, Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential campaign, have been accusing the Obama administration of waging a “war on religion.” That’s preposterous, of course; the real threat comes from precisely the opposite direction, a war on civil society waged in the name of religion.

For a brief moment following the Arizona veto, I thought the lesson might be that this war, having finally seized the country’s attention to its divisive potential, had hit a wall and was playing itself out. After all, days before Governor Brewer’s veto, the conservative Republican leadership of the Kansas State Senate suddenly came to its senses and decided to kill an even nastier “religious liberty” bill that would have permitted anyone, on the basis of “sincerely held religious beliefs,” to withhold “any services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges” from same-sex couples. (Unlike the Kansas bill, the Arizona bill did not guarantee that such a defense would necessarily prevail and was drafted more deftly in more general terms, permitting its defenders to deny that it had anything to do with gays and to claim with a straight face that any assertion to the contrary was just a reflection of left-wing media distortions.)

But I quickly realized how naïve it was to assume even for a minute that the genie unleashed by the remarkably rapid cultural shifts the country is experiencing on questions of sexuality and marriage can be so easily confined. Events are conspiring to keep clashes of church and state in the spotlight.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/opinion/greenhouse-after-the-veto.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0

[freshwest]

1. She defines it well: 'a war on civil society waged in the name of religion.'

And people had better start talking about it in those terms. Going after believers on the basis of insulting their faith is a dead end. Those who feel in any way attacked, fight harder.

The argument for the equality for all protected by civil society is obvious to anyone, even the religionists. Unless they have gone off the deep end through propaganda, they can be reached to stop voting in these extremist groups.

For their own protection, they need to protect equality in the government. There is a case to made to church goers as most believe in rightful authority. Strip away the propaganda and low level hatefulness, which actually argues against the Golden Rule, and you can help those of any group see the value in equality by law.

[BlueStreak]

2. I don't really understand the legal theory on this issue

It seems clear enough that if a business offers a service to one demographic, they shouldn't be allowed to deny that same service to a different demographic, if that second demographic is a protected class. On the other hand, I don't see where a business can be compelled to offer a service they don't want to perform.

Let's say I am a professional musician. My preference is to play swing era hits and 1970s funk. If somebody wants to hire me to play Shirley Temple songs and I refuse, surely that is my right.

So I really don't understand what the uproar is all about with this law. I understand there wasn't a single precedent in Arizona for the theoretical concern, so obvious the Republicans were just being dickish as usual. On the other hand, I don't see that this law would have changed anything, considering the situation never came up before.

Can somebody educate me here?