The ‘Religious Liberty’ Bullies and Their Fight Against LGBT Equality

[SecularMotion]

Thirty-five years ago, having lost the moral battle for segregation, a small group of evangelicals met to rethink their attitude toward politics. Unlike Catholics and mainline Protestants, evangelicals had tended to stay out of secular politics, believing it to be irredeemable. But with the IRS’s decision to withdraw tax-exempt status from the evangelical Bob Jones University, which discriminated against African-Americans, the Christian right was born. Their mission, they said, was to defend “religious liberty.”

Today is a different age—but the players, and the rhetoric, are the same. Today a far-right coalition of conservative Catholics and evangelicals perceive that they have lost the moral battle against LGBT equality, particularly same-sex marriage. And so, as described in a lengthy report released Monday by the think tank Political Research Associates and chiefly authored by this writer, they are waging a multi-pronged battle against LGBT rights, not on substantive moral grounds but on the premise that equality for gays restricts the religious liberty of Christians to discriminate against them.

Of course, this is rhetoric, not reality. Forty years ago, the newly minted Christian right “played the victim” by claiming that a racist school, rather than the students being discriminated against, was the true victim. And today religious-liberty activists claim that bullies are the real victims because they cannot “express their views about homosexuality.” They claim that businesses who say “No Gays Allowed” are being oppressed because they are forced to “facilitate” gay marriages. And they claim that the real targets of discrimination are not gay people, who in 24 states can be fired from their jobs simply for being gay, but employers who can’t fire them.

Yet unlike recent anti-gay sloganeering, the religious-liberty campaign makes use not of theological arguments but of civil libertarian ones, and as such is much harder to recognize than the usual Bible-quoting bigotry. Indeed, Catholic-funded organizations such as The Becket Fund—named, not coincidentally, for the archbishop who chose martyrdom rather than obedience to the secular law—and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have co-opted the work of respected law professors such as Douglas Laycock of Virginia. They have even convinced Stanford University to establish a Becket-funded “Center for Religious Liberty.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/18/the-religious-liberty-bullies-and-their-fight-against-lgbt-equality.html

[LiberalEsto]

1. Please don't confuse those creeps with Americans for Religious Liberty

ARL has been around for a long time. More than 20 years ago I used to work for them in a minor capacity.

Here's part of their mission statement:

"We believe in the free exercise of conscience and religion, restraining persons from such exercise only when they harm others or the public welfare. We oppose any effort to place any ethnic, racial, religious, sex or age limitation on the enjoyment of rights or equal treatment."

http://www.arlinc.org/index.html