Rick Duncan wrote:
This is why some of us fight so hard against gay rights and gay marriage--gay rights/marriage are incompatible (at least in certain situations) with religious liberty. As in Massachusetts, the state has to choose between religious liberty and gay rights.
I could not disagree with this more. There is no religious liberty issue at stake here. The Church has retained all of its religious liberty. In fact, it has chosen to exercise that religious liberty by refusing to take part in something it finds sinful. I would go so far as to argue that religious liberty and gay rights are not only compatible, they are based on exactly the same set of basic principles; do away with one and you do away with both. That is why I am every bit as opposed to, for example, policies forcing churches to perform gay marriages (which no one has suggested, thank goodness) as I am the prohibition on gay marriage in the first place. It's why I write as often about the free speech rights of anti-gay ministers (in the context of punishing such people regularly in Canada, England and other places) as I do about anti-sodomy laws. You cannot subdivide rights. The right to speak out against homosexuality and the right to engage in sodomy, for example, are based upon the very same principles - the right to pursue happiness so long as your actions do not deprive another of the same, the fact of self-ownership, and the principle that government's authority is limited by the need to protect one from another. In neither case does any government have legitimate authority to use its power, in my view.
Ed Brayton _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
