Sorry, National Review. "Religious Freedom" Bills Do Permit Bigotry

[rug]

Image from Project Q Atlanta, January 2017

BY SUNNIVIE BRYDUM
FEBRUARY 12, 2017

National Review writer Alexandra Desanctis on Wednesday published a piece purporting to explain how recent conservative efforts to defend “religious freedom” aren’t really about discriminating against LGBT Americans. Since she used a Salon piece written a day earlier by a former colleague of mine, Nico Lang, to illustrate how liberals are “maliciously mischaracteriz(ing0… FADA and other religious-freedom protections,” it seems only fair to issue a point-by-point response to the specious claims made in the National Review.

It is deeply ironic to claim, in the piece’s opening argument, that Lang is deliberately mischaracterizing these legislative and executive efforts, when Desanctis goes on to misrepresent almost every legislative and executive action she discusses. I can’t speak to any “malicious” intent of the author, but a cursory examination of her contemporaries reveals a lopsided tendency to use religion to justify anti-LGBT discrimination, then fall eerily silent when the religious freedom of non-Christians is threatened.

Desanctis complains that Lang betrays his biases immediately, by putting the phrase “religious freedom” in quotes. But Lang, a seasoned reporter I’ve worked with in my former capacity as managing editor of The Advocate, is on solid journalistic ground here. The weaponized kind of “religious freedom” at issue in President Trump’s draft executive order is precisely the modern mutation of this foundational principle, which undoubtedly deserves to be placed in scare quotes, as publications ranging from New York Magazine to the Wall Street Journal do.

The author’s complaints about Lang willfully misrepresenting the facts are particularly laughable in the face of the outright falsehoods Desanctis offers in response. Most immediately and demonstrably, Desanctis implies that “religious freedom” bills and the executive order are concerned only with marriage. And while the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges did directly deal with marriage equality (tossing a single sentence in Justice Kennedy’s masterful opinion to the anti-equality concerns of religious objectors), nearly every legislative effort billed as a protection of religious liberty since then has reached far beyond the county clerk’s office.

http://religiondispatches.org/sorry-national-review-religious-freedom-bills-do-permit-bigotry/