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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015 - Less Wrong
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I don't think forcing ministers and priests to perform gay weddings is at all likely. I don't even think it's likely that there will be an effort to pass laws requiring that is at likely in the reasonably near future.
I think it's likely that some on the left will be applying social pressure, but that's short of force, and there's going to be countervailing pressure.
Please update your model of reality.
Hmm. The Washington Times is not exactly what I'd call an unbiased source on this sort of stuff. Looking elsewhere on the web, I find the following:
all of which suggests to me that ministers and priests performing their usual functions as ministers and priests remain in no danger of being forced to perform same-sex marriages, but that if they choose to start marrying people for profit rather than as a normal part of exercising their calling as ministers, the fact of being ordained doesn't exempt them from the same laws other people marrying people for profit are subject to. (And that there may be something less than perfectly sincere about the Knapps' protestations.)
I can't tell what if anything happened to the lawsuit, except that a few weeks after it was filed it looked as if it might get settled out of court, with the city agreeing to treat the Hitching Post as a "religious corporation" after all. (All the more reason not to think anyone's freedom is in much danger.)
[EDITED to fix an inconsequential typo. Also, if whoever downvoted this did so for reasons of quality rather than ideology and would like to tell me what they found wrong with it, I'm all ears.]
"They settled out of court on favorable terms" doesn't mean it's not a danger, unless the terms are so favorable that nobody's ever going to court for this again. Court cases are expensive and just having to go to court to affirm that what you're doing is legal is a cost all by itself.
Oh, I agree: the fact that they settled out of court on its own doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
What means there isn't a problem is that so far every single same-sex-marriage law has had an explicit exemption saying that religious organizations aren't obliged to perform same-sex marriages, and that the best example VoiceOfRa could find turns out to be one where there is an explicit exemption and what actually happened is that a commercial wedding factory tried to make out that they were being oppressed. And even then it turns out that they're probably getting what they want after all, but that's just icing on the cake.
Explicit exemptions that don't prevent lawsuits are failed explicit exemptions. They're not working, because they don't prevent the person who wants to use the exception from taking damage.
(And that includes preemptive lawsuits, if the preemptive lawsuit is actually necessary to settle the issue and is not a slam dunk.)
Sometimes there are unreasonable lawsuits. Sometimes there are unavoidable corner cases that give rise to reasonable lawsuits. Neither of these means that the law is wrong.
I'm not sure exactly what point you're arguing now.
Clearly you find something unsatisfactory here. Could you describe how the law could look, such that there would be no risk of lawsuits like the Knapps'?
Obviously one way to do that would be not to permit same-sex marriages after all, but it appears that the Will of the People is to permit them[1], and if we have to choose between "one business was worried that some day hypothetically it might be required to conduct a same-sex wedding, which for religious reasons its owners don't want it to do" and "many thousands of couples who want to get married are forbidden to do so" it doesn't seem like a difficult choice.
Or you could nominally permit same-sex marriage but provide a blanket exemption saying that no person or institution can ever be compelled to marry any same-sex couple if they don't want to. The likely effect is that in large regions of the USA any same-sex couple wanting to get married has to travel a long way to find anyone who'll marry them. Again, that seems like a pretty bad outcome.
Or you could have an exemption specifically for religious institutions because those are the ones that have the deepest-rooted, hardest-to-get-around, most-sympathized-with objections to same-sex marriage. Which is a common state of affairs now, and generally seems to work OK. But as soon as you do anything like this, you open up the possibility of lawsuits like the Knapps'.
(Or you could have no exemptions and say to hell with religious organizations that have a problem. Which I would regard as a bad option, but it's pretty much symmetrical with the "no same-sex marriage" option except that fewer people get screwed over.)
So if there's an actually possible option that rules out the possibility of lawsuits like this one, while not harming a whole lot more people, I'm not seeing it. What do you think they should have done instead and why?
[1] In jurisdictions where same-sex marriage is a thing, that is.
In order for the law to be a law that works, there has to be no significant risk of lawsuits [1]. It is possible that in the current political climate, there is no way the law could look that makes there be no risk of lawsuits. This would mean that in the current political climate, there is no way the law could work.
And if there's no way the law could work, that answers the first question: religious organizations are at risk of being forced to perform gay marriages, and laws that try to prevent such force don't work.
[1] Again, preemptive lawsuits count if they are meant to prevent a real risk of normal lawsuits and are not a slam dunk.
I see that I have been unclear, and I'll try to fix that. When I said "how the law could look", I didn't mean "the law permitting same-sex marriage", I meant "the law as a whole". So, in particular, "same-sex marriage stays illegal" is one possible way the law could look.
Regardless, I'm puzzled by two features of your answer.
First: Suppose the law said: Same-sex couples are allowed to get married, but no one is under any circumstances obliged to marry them. Then there would be no possible grounds for a lawsuit of the kind we're discussing here. Why doesn't that refute your suggestion that perhaps "there is no way the law could work"?
(Of course there might then be a risk of lawsuits from same-sex couples who want to get married but can't. But your second paragraph makes it clear that you aren't counting that under the heading of "no way the law could work".)
Second: there are what look to me like some serious gaps in your reasoning. To explain the gaps I think I see, I'll begin by repeating your argument in more explicit form; please let me know if I misrepresent it. I'll consider the law as it currently is rather than the more general question of whether any modified version might be better.
Now, of course I agree with A. I do not agree with B; there are other reasons why the Knapps and/or the ADF might have chosen to file their lawsuit even if there was never a real risk that the Knapps would be required to perform same-sex marriages. I agree that C is a reasonable inference from B (and indeed might be correct even if B isn't). I do not agree with the inference from C to D; the Knapps' institution wasn't a religious organization in the relevant sense, and if it had been then they would have been at no risk of coercion.
It seems, as I mentioned above, that shortly before filing the lawsuit the Knapps made a number of changes to the Hitching Post's stated principles and practices. Perhaps after those changes it was a religious organization in the relevant sense. I hope it's clear that "My organization was told it might have to conduct same-sex weddings; then a bunch of things about it changed; now my organization is a religious organization; therefore religious organizations are at risk of being forced to conduct same-sex weddings" is not good reasoning.
So: I still don't see how the Knapps' story is good evidence against Nancy's denial that "forcing ministers and priests to perform gay weddings is at all likely".
I was actually rather hoping you'd answer the last question I asked: what do you think they should have done instead and why? (For instance, do you think it would be best to forbid same-sex marriages altogether, on the grounds that if they are legal then it's possible that some day a religious organization might have to conduct one?)
This is an incorrect description of my argument. It is not true, in general, that preemptive lawsuits indicate a real risk. But it is true in this case, because what they were told by the city attorney's office.
I don't know that there was anything they could have done instead. It may just be that they were screwed.
Actually, I think the original question wasn't about organizations, it was about individuals.
I think these two sentence fragments directly contradict each other. And the second looks silly, too -- what, there would be literally not one single person willing to marry them?
Legally speaking, in the US the issue is basically Constitutional. The question is whether forcing people to perform actions contrary to their religious beliefs infringes on their right to the "free exercise" of their religion.
It was phrased that way, but I think it's obviously a Wrong Question when phrased that way and I'm fairly sure that what makes it sound worrying when someone talks about "the left forcing ministers to perform gay weddings" is not the idea that ministers might be treated in such a disagreeable way, but the idea that churches (and other such entities -- but in the US it's usually churches) might be. That is: If the Reverend Bob Smith, a minister of the Fundamental Free Fundamentalist Church of Freedom, stops being (or never is) a full-time minister of religion, and starts up Bob's Wedding Shack providing weddings for anyone who'll pay, then even though Bob may still be an ordained minister of the FFFCoF he's no longer acting as one, he's providing a commercial service and should be subject to the same terms as anyone else providing a commercial service.
(This is the way other similar religious exemptions tend to work. The FFFCoF may refuse to employ women as ministers and that's fine, but Bob's Wedding Shack isn't allowed to refuse to employ women as secretaries. It may deny evolution and no one will force its services to put a reading from the Origin of Species alongside Genesis 1, but if Bob's next job is as a biology teacher then the fact that he's an ordained minister gives him no special right to tell his students that life on earth is less than 10,000 years old. The point isn't special rights for ministers, it's special protections for religious groups.)
So: yeah, there might be a risk that ministers will be forced to conduct same-sex weddings -- in the sense that someone who is an ordained minister might take some entirely different job that involves marrying people. But that's not what any reasonable person is actually worried about. (Unless they are worried more generally that religious people might be forced to conduct same-sex weddings despite disapproving. But that's got nothing to do with ministers as such.)
No, because The People are not unanimous and their opinions are not uniformly distributed geographically.
Take a look at the distribution of abortion clinics in the southern United States some time. E.g., if you're in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, you may be 150 miles from the nearest one. The reasons for this are much the same as the reasons for which a same-sex couple might have trouble finding people to marry them in some scenarios. And it's perfectly compatible with its being the Will of the People for abortion to be legal.
Is it? The Will of the People, especially the Will of the People of Texas, for abortion to be legal is a rather dubious claim.
That's not obvious to me. Let me explain.
My understanding of who can marry whom is hazy, but as far as I know in the US it works as follows. There are two classes of people who have the power to marry. The first class is government officials and if you want a civil (non-religious) marriage, you just go to the City Hall and get married there. No problems and we're not talking about those people. The second class is priests/ministers/rabbis/imams/etc. of a recognized religion.
The thing is, Bob Smith as a plain-vanilla citizen has no right to marry anyone. Even is he opens a business and calls it Bob's Wedding Shack, he still has no right to marry anyone. He can only marry people if he is acting as a priest/minister/rabbi/imam/etc. And if he's one, he doesn't need to have a business to do so -- he can marry people for fun in his spare time, if he wishes.
Rights come in pairs with duties. If you want to give a gay couple the right to be wed, it means that somebody has a duty to marry them. City officials have such a duty and that's fine. The question is whether priests have a duty to marry them. And it's a person who does marriage rite, not an organization.
That's not really comparable. To conduct abortions you need to be a licensed MD, have a clinic, etc. etc. To marry people you need nothing.
As you say, some on the left will be applying social (and economic) pressure, just as everyone else does when they're able to. And there's a fairly well-established rhetorical convention in my culture whereby any consistently applied social pressure is labelled "force," "bullying," "discrimination," "lynching," "intolerance," and whatever other words can get the desired rhetorical effect.
We can get into a whole thing about what those words actually mean, but in my experience basically nobody cares. They are phatic expressions, not technical ones.
Leaving the terminology aside... I expect the refusal to perform gay weddings to become socially acceptable to fewer and fewer people, and social condemnable to more and more people. And I agree with skeptical_lurker that this process, whatever we call it, will cause some resentment among the people who are aligned with such refusal. (Far more significantly, I expect it to catalyze existing resentment.)
Those of us who endorse that social change would probably do best to accept that this is one of the consequences of that change, and plan accordingly.