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VoiceOfRa comments on Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Suppose this interpretation was correct, what does it say about the current left-wing approach to Christianity?
Also, paganism was never a unified thing, and by the late Roman empire most of the leadership wasn't ethnically Italian (much less Roman).
Well, there are countries where public Christianity is banned, but the US isn't one of them.
I think that the left forcing ministers to perform gay weddings is going to cause resentment, but then the Christian right trying to ban abortion and stem cell research and the teaching of evolution are in the wrong too.
What about the left legalizing abortion in the first place, by way of a Supreme Court Decision with such convoluted logic that even people who agree with the outcome won't defend it.
Who's trying to bad the teaching of evolution? Oh wait, did you mean the people who oppose banning the teaching of creationism?
The primary contests are being fought in the school boards setting curriculum standards, material on mandatory tests, textbooks, and so on. I don't think it's an accurate characterization to talk about "banning" or "oppose banning." I think the "teach the controversy" phrasing seems much more appropriate--the main policy options are for the government educational arm to teach evolution, teach creationism, or teach that both are options.
(Imagine that child education was like adult education--there's no "banning" of teaching Christian theology, but making it so that no one could require anyone to learn Christian theology might seem like a 'ban' if that was the status quo.)
"Banning" was skeptical_lurker's term.
Yes, but it was appropriate because teaching of evolution actually has been banned in the US (those bans have since been repealed). I am not aware of bills that ban the teaching of creationism--only ones that ban restrictions on the teaching of creationism--but I don't pay much attention to this issue and so may have missed something in my five minutes of Googling.
I'm not sure about bills, there have supreme court cases to that effect.
I don't see that in the lede:
That is, the case banned a legal requirement to teach creationism, but did not ban the teaching of "a variety of scientific theories". It ruled that creationism is a religious view, not a scientific one, but it does not suggest that it is thereby unconstitutional to teach it, only that it is unconstitutional to require it to be taught.
If the permissibility, rather than the requirement, of teaching religion in a public school is an issue, it is one that lies outside the matter of this case. Indeed, at the end of the article it says of one of the creationists in the case that he "later authored books promoting creationism and teaching it in public schools". There is no hint that there was any legal impediment to him doing so.
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.
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.
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.