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Indiana's Pence to sign bill allowing businesses to reject gay customers

Therein lies the deception and BS that the Mormon church engaged in. There are documents and recordings that demonstrate the actions of the Mormon church and the efforts that they underwent to hide their illegal activities.



Illegal activities? The mormons may have violated their own internal rules by creatively accounting for monies spent, but they did nothing illegal. They retain the same right to advocate for or against legislation as anyone else. They just have to show a religous basis for doing so.
 
Neither the federal RFRA nor any SCOTUS decision extends to considering anyone of any belief to be "the devil." That's already out of bounds.

Also, too, let's try again on this:

And on the broader question, you've also quoted legal experts who say there isn't any instance of the RFRA allowing discrimination against LGBT. But clearly some people's consciences demand they DO discriminate - they've sued for the right to discriminate against same sex couples and deny service to them.

This law either does or does not give Christians the right to act consistent with their conscience and deny services to gays. Which is it?

BTW, you're hilariously saying that if liberals believe one of your statements (law allows people to act consistent with their consciences), they're purposely ginning up a faux controversy, and to prove it you contradict yourself and point out nothing in RFRA or state equivalents allow for discrimination....
 
I'm not so sure about that. The Supreme Court has largely left intact the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The law was deemed an unconstitutional use of Congress' enforcement powers as it applied to the states, but that's about it. It still applies to the federal government. So now some states are using this law (which, incidentally, was introduced by one of the most liberal Democrats in Congress, Chuck Schumer, passed unanimously in in the House, and signed into law by Bill Clinton) as a model to answer the adoption of same-sex marriage within their borders by court decree. Since SCOTUS said the federal law doesn't apply to the states, some states felt they needed to close that argument. More recently SCOTUS has shown a tendency to uphold religious freedom, as in the Hobby Lobby case.

Quite a few states have passed their own RFRA's, modeled on the federal RFRA. The main thing these do is subject state laws which restrict the free exercise of religion to a rigorous standard that borrows the language of the Supreme Court's "strict scrutiny" standard. The intent of these laws is to restore the broad view of the right to free exercise the Court took in Verner, Yoder, and other decisions before 1990, when it drastically narrowed its interpretation of the right in Employment Division v. Smith. Smith was an Indian who had been fired for taking peyote, and for that reason denied unemployment payments by Oregon. He claimed he had been exercising his religion by taking the peyote, but the Court was unwilling to let that trump a generally applicable state law.

The Court had been showing signs of becoming more skeptical of free exercise claims in decisions before Smith, but the decision still shocked people enough to prompt the federal RFRA. The RFRA was the law involved in the Hobby Lobby case. The Court held an HHS regulation violated the RFRA because the government could not show it was the alternative that least restricted the right to free exercise, as that law requires. (The owners of Hobby Lobby believed four of the contraceptives it was being required to provide were in fact abortifacients and objected to them because of their religious opposition to abortion.)

An existing HHS rule made an accommodation for religious non-profits that relieved the employer of the duty to include contraceptives in its employee health insurance plan, and had the insurer itself provide the employees contraceptives in a separate plan. The Court could see no good reason why HHS could not also extend this rule, which burdened the right to free exercise less than the rule being challenged, to for-profit religious corporations like Hobby Lobby.
 
Please define public accomodation. Is a grocery store a public accomodation? How about a clothing store? A hardware store? A hair dresser?

I'm not here to educate you. There are various laws concerning public accommodations. If you want to learn about them, "Google is your friend"
 
I'm not here to educate you. There are various laws concerning public accommodations. If you want to learn about them, "Google is your friend"
So you can't define it? I want to know your definition of public accomodation.
 
A
Conventions in Indiana? :shock: I've been to conventions all over the world, and never one there. I'm not sure how the threats to Pence are going to work...they said Arizona was dead after Brewer signed her bill into law, and tourism hasn't suffered there.

I'll bet SCOTUS will overturn this easily.

It hurt business here when Brewer signed the bill. A year later it was felt. Big new convention center and no one using it or hotels or golf courses.
 
10 bucks says this law will backfire when enterprising liberals decide that serving Republicans I'd against their religion.
 
One was tyranny aimed at the consumer, the new one is tyranny aimed at the merchant. Tyranny is tyranny

This regime is tyrannical!!! It's requiring businesses open to the public to serve ALL the public. Oh, the HORROR!!
 
Therein lies the deception and BS that the Mormon church engaged in. There are documents and recordings that demonstrate the actions of the Mormon church and the efforts that they underwent to hide their illegal activities.

I don't care even a little bit. Seems like free political speech to me. Regardless, I note the absence of a link to substantiate your claim.
 
It depends. You're I assume deliberately missing the point.

You mention the baker. You have no idea what his conscience says about baking a cake versus baking a cake AND putting two grooms on top, but conclude that the law cannot require him to act contrary to his conscience AND that "he'd have to bake the cake." Both can't be true. Again, pick a side, any side.

Sorry, but I'm pretty sure claims of conscience can't be extended to cake baking.
 
The law prohibits discrimination against Jews. A skinhead's conscience (presumably) tells him to discriminate against Jews. If he's in business open to the public, the law requires him to act contrary to his conscience.

I don't know why you're insisting I embrace cognitive dissonance to have this discussion with you.

There's no cognitive dissonance involved. Your skinhead is free to hate Jews and he's free to avoid participation in their activities but he's not free to decline normal commercial interaction just because of who they are, and the RFRA would not protect him in that case.
 
Also, too, let's try again on this:

And on the broader question, you've also quoted legal experts who say there isn't any instance of the RFRA allowing discrimination against LGBT. But clearly some people's consciences demand they DO discriminate - they've sued for the right to discriminate against same sex couples and deny service to them.

This law either does or does not give Christians the right to act consistent with their conscience and deny services to gays. Which is it?

BTW, you're hilariously saying that if liberals believe one of your statements (law allows people to act consistent with their consciences), they're purposely ginning up a faux controversy, and to prove it you contradict yourself and point out nothing in RFRA or state equivalents allow for discrimination....

It's a nuanced question that may be too fine-grained for you. The RFRA does not protect those who decline normal commercial interaction. It does protect those whose specific services would require them to participate in or appear to endorse an activity that offends their conscience. The hard cases are those determining where normal commercial interaction stops and infringements of conscience begin.
 

Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Explained

2:10 PM, Mar 27, 2015 • By JOHN MCCORMACKOn Thursday, Indiana governor Mike Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) into law, and some celebrities, politicians, and journalists--including Miley Cyrus, Ashton Kutcher, and Hillary Clinton, just to name a few--are absolutely outraged. They say the law is a license to discriminate against gay people:

Read more...

". . . . Stanford law professor Michael McConnell, a former appellate court judge, tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email: "In the decades that states have had RFRA statutes, no business has been given the right to discriminate against gay customers, or anyone else." So what is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and what does it say?
The first RFRA was a 1993 federal law that was signed into law by Democratic president Bill Clinton. It unanimously passed the House of Representatives, where it was sponsored by then-congressman Chuck Schumer, and sailed through the Senate on a 97-3 vote.
The law reestablished a balancing test for courts to apply in religious liberty cases (a standard had been used by the Supreme Court for decades). RFRA allows a person's free exercise of religion to be "substantially burdened" by a law only if the law furthers a "compelling governmental interest" in the "least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest."
So the law doesn't say that a person making a religious claim will always win. In the years since RFRA has been on the books, sometimes the courts have ruled in favor of religious exemptions, but many other times they haven't. . . . . "
 
10 bucks says this law will backfire when enterprising liberals decide that serving Republicans I'd against their religion.
That's fine. I just won't patronize that store. People discriminate all the time when they decide what stores to patronize. So, it's okay for me not to patronize a store because the owner is gay but it's not okay for the owner to refuse to serve me because I'm gay? That's rank hypocrisy. I think there should be a law that requires mandatory patronage of businesses. It's not fair that people discriminate between businesses.
 
Indeed a perverted interpenetration of the First Amendment.
 
Illegal activities? The mormons may have violated their own internal rules by creatively accounting for monies spent, but they did nothing illegal. They retain the same right to advocate for or against legislation as anyone else. They just have to show a religous basis for doing so.

Actually....no. The Mormon illegal activity is prop 8 is widely documented. They should have lost their tax exempt status over their activities...but no one cares enough to enforce the rules. Lying and deceiving in the so-called "name of God" is still lying and deceiving.
 
I don't care even a little bit. Seems like free political speech to me. Regardless, I note the absence of a link to substantiate your claim.

Churches are not allowed to engage in political speech if they want to retain their tax exempt status. I'll get you a link.
 
I don't care even a little bit. Seems like free political speech to me. Regardless, I note the absence of a link to substantiate your claim.

Here are your links:

Mormons Found Guilty on 13 Counts of Prop 8 Malfeasance, Fined by FPPC | California Progress Report

Mormongate -- The Church's Cover-up of its Prop 8 Funding | Fred Karger


And if you are willing to spend 7 minutes....this is the best one which documents clearly the illegal Mormon activities:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWCum9yQhTg
 
OK, so you're smart enough to know better than to equate those two, as it would be absurd. I guess that's a good thing.

In the meantime, the rest of the world who hasn't accepted the Orwellian redefinition of the word will continue to refer to the CEO who fired his worker because he's gay as a bigot or perhaps anti-gay bigot, and pretty much no one will have any doubt about the meaning we're trying to get across. Exactly no one not trying to miss the point will label the CFO who resigned in protest as a "bigot." We'd all recognize he's standing against bigotry and discrimination in the workplace.

I understand what you're saying...

But who changed the definition?

http://www.marketfaith.org/are-christians-really-bigots-and-homophobes/
 
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