Senate Republicans Introduce Religious ‘License to Discriminate’ Bill

Essentially their saying that it’s a part of the Christian religion to be bigots and persecute others. Yeah, we already knew that but America is a secular nation. If you want to enjoy persecuting others in the name of religion Afghanistan has plenty of real estate available.

“We are witnessing a growing climate of intolerance against
individuals and organizations who believe that marriage is the union of
one man and one woman…”

Show me one goddamned state, just one, that has outlawed heterosexual marriage. Until then? Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

Agreed, but the assumption of those laws was that churches are automatically doing charitable work and weren’t in it for the money, so they just gave them blanket tax exemption. Obviously, this isn’t true, so those laws need to go away.

“… the assumption of those laws was that churches are automatically doing charitable work and weren’t in it for the money… Obviously, this isn’t true…”

Nor has it ever been. St. Reagan (pbuh) once said “It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”

He was only barely right. Politics is the third oldest, with the profession of clergy being the second. Where he was also wrong was in the comparison to the first oldest profession, prostitution. Though the three may have striking resemblances to the casual observer, there is one very distinct, glaring difference that sets the oldest profession apart from the other two: it’s a far more honest one.

WAIT WOULD THIS LAW ALSO PROTECT “RELIGIOUS” BELIEFS THAT WOULD PROTECT CHURCHES/OFFICIALS THAT REFUSE TO PERFORM HETEROSEXUAL MARRIAGE CEREMONIES? I wonder how fast this act will be repealed when it is used against the people who introduced the law in the first place…

“We are witnessing a growing climate of intolerance against
individuals and organizations who believe that marriage is the union of
one man and one woman”

Maybe that’s because it’s an archaic and outdated concept based on an anthology of 2000 year old fairy tales with absolutely ZERO basis in a 21st century reality, you fucking nimrod!

This is a fantastic law. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but it gives any group that is recognized as a religion to define marriage in their own way. I would pay good money to be in the court room the first time this is used in a polygamy case, or a pedophilia case, or an interspecies marriage case. I imagine the politicians’ responses will be much the same as when The Satanic Temple proposed a monument at the Oklahoma capitol building.

There is NO justification for discrimination, religious or otherwise.

Once again the republicans are dog whistling through the graveyard.

This is replacement text for a misread post. Please ignore.

Wall asked for a state that outlawed hetero (1 man + 1 woman) marriage, none of which, including Texas, have.

My mistake. I misread the post. Deleted.

Senator David Vitter. For whom marriage is between his wife, his prostitute and his diaper.

If they want to eliminate these rules, then they should advocate for eliminating all of them. A lot of libertarians and anarchists are against nondiscrimination rules. Of course that means that your atheist boss could fire you for being religious. Oh, that would suck if people could discriminate against you? I’m so sick of this bunch. People unwilling to employ empathy are unworthy of any for themselves. Let them get a taste of their own medicine and see how they like it.

I’d like to add something like that. I”m so fucking sick of Republican friends and relatives making excuses for the religious extremists that run their party now. Stop telling me you don’t agree with them, AND TELL THEM!

Excellent point. Maybe we should all be getting our “authorized religious person” paperwork, take our tax break, and begin marrying all kinds of people…or things. The only issue with this law is does it define the legal, civil, government sponsored marriage, or does it simply allow church’s do what they can already do now and not marry someone in the ceremony? I mean, you aren’t married by a church, no matter what they say. You are married with a license from the State.

i know we have republicans and conservatives who at least skim this blog. you republican voters, i ask you: is your world so comfortable, your income so guaranteed, your confidence in your health and safety and retirement so assured…

You will not like the answer.

I currently work a $9 an hour job, and together with my partner barely (often not-even-barely) scrape by on rent and bills.

I am a conservative. (Not a Republican, though occasionally vote that way, but that would be a pointless digression into wherefores which would distract from the point at hand.)

There are plenty of attitudes prevalent among conservatives that could be roundly criticized and easily mocked. And they are, by liberals, to great effect. My personal favorite is my fellow traveler’s tendency to deny that a problem exists when said problem doesn’t have an ideologically convenient solution. Drives me up a wall.

But you know what is equally obnoxious? Liberal smug superiority. “Little people”? Fuck you. The tendency to believe that conservatives are benighted useful idiots, that we don’t know–couldn’t possibly know–our own interests. You can certainly drop that any time. It never occurs to you that we might just have different values, that those values are ill-served by (sometimes comic, but more usually tragic) liberal heedlessness when faced with the same problems that some conservatives deny. Liberals who propose vast and sweeping changes to deal with problems, uncaring about little teensy concerns like whether it would be reversible if it turns out to be an incredibly bad idea in practice. Or what is traded in terms of existing value to the new system that will replace it. Or whether that system will have the same flexibility to handle unintended consequences as the one it replaces.

I am annoyed as anyone over the co-optation of the right by the religious (a historical anomaly in the US), but that is a poor enough excuse for liberals to smear conservatism for whatever else it happens to be. Seeing you conflate these effects with your assumptions about wealth and privilege just means that you can’t see individuals for individuals, and that is infinitely sadder than the academic question of whether any given person is the best little monkey for their own interests they can be.

If you really want a constructive answer to your question, perhaps you should yank all the bullshit assumptions out of it and try again. (Perhaps start with the assumption that some asshole in Utah in any way represents conservatives overall.)

I think you need to yank the word “conservative” back from the reactionaries the Republicans have become. While I’m not a conservative, I can respect the ideas and ideals that form it. What you see from people like these fucks in the Senate is not classical conservatism, which (if I am correct) is more of what you espouse.

LOL

By approaching problems carefully you run the risk of not being able to get to people in time. By not dealing with poverty we can effectively doom generations to more poverty. Which won’t happen if those with more to give give more.

Sometimes it helps to take a lot of time to know how to solve a problem. Sometimes you can’t take too much time or it will lead to disaster. It is hard to know one from the other sometimes.

I don’t mean taking time, exactly, just taking care. The tendency to try to shoot the moon, find the silver bullet that will solve the problem in one fell swoop, I think is the attitude that poisons a great deal of the policy end of the political discourse.

Take health care, for example. We already had a great model for single-payer-lite health care with Medicare/Medicaid/S-Chip. So, instead of looking for ways to incrementally expand those programs till they covered the uncovered–which clustered disproportionately around the cut-off ages/income levels for those programs; i.e. the nearly destitute, the sort-of young, and the almost old–they decided to kick over the whole chessboard. (Why? Because it was the only way to maintain the viability of private insurance companies; talk about fucked up priorities.) Some of the blame for that can easily be laid at the feet of intransigent, uninterested Republicans, certainly. But the rest can easily be pinned upon Democrats who wanted something flashy that they could take credit for, a program all their own.

ETA: They ended up making a lot of unfillable promises about what the new system would and would not deliver precisely because it changed so much the outcome became impossible to predict.

Another way of thinking about “taking care” is being observant of other approaches that others have taken to address the same problem. There are many different approaches, worldwide, for government guarantees of health care, and many of them have existed for a long time, the benefits and pitfalls of each being well-studied; we decided to follow or borrow or learn from pretty much none of them, and instead tried to analogize from a system one-fiftieth of the size that operated within one state.

It’s not about taking time. There will always be exigency; there’s always more that could be done NOW. The difficult, extremely unpleasant task is figuring out whether acting heedlessly is worth it in the long run. Let’s say we help everyone NOW using a structure that is unstable and is fated to collapse due to bad design. So, TOMORROW, more people end up needing more help than the number and amount who need it NOW.

That doesn’t strike me as a good approach. Imagine if Obama and Congress had jumped into taking sides in the Syrian Civil War, on the ground that thousands of people were dying each month, and only later realizing that one side was a brutal dictator and the other side ended up being psychotic Islamists (something which wasn’t immediately obvious). Lots of people, on humanitarian grounds, bitterly criticized their (particularly his) reticence to jump in right away, and yet it turned out that not bending to the immediacy of the problem was the better course.

Now, I will absolutely agree that some use prudence as an excuse to defer action or consideration entirely. And that’s wrong, exactly what I was talking about re: the tendency of conservatives to ignore difficult or inconvenient problems. But due consideration is an attitude and a process, not a specific length of time. It just takes people stopping and thinking, rather than going for the most obvious or first solution that presents. Is there a less disruptive way to achieve the same ends? It’s probably on those grounds alone a better one than one that makes sweeping changes. Very occasionally, immediate drastic action is the best choice, but those situations are rare and don’t take on the general character of policy disagreement.

There are several different types of tax exemptions. There’s “People who give you money can deduct that money from their income”, there’s “You don’t have to pay income tax on the money people give you” and there’s also “You don’t have to pay property tax on the land you own”. The first two, make sense on the basis of churches allegedly engaging in charitable work. The third, not so much, and AFAIK, other charitable organizations down get that exemption.

This country was founded on freedom of religion–free to practice your religion without interference from the government.

I believe a church has a faith based right to deny to perform a marriage ceremony to a couple that the church feels is not entitled to marriage. (The government does not have this right).

It seems to me there is no need to introduce a bill that is already covered by law.

Taxes is a whole new ball game. I see no reason why churches are tax-free to begin with.

Lets put this in the law. Churches can preach any doctrine they want. But the minute they make one statement regarding any influence on anything secular–influencing their members to vote, boycott, picket–ANYTHING–they automatically lose their tax-free status.

Businesses are NOT individuals and have no religious rights.

We’ve spent about the last hundred years spelling out what classifies as a civil right and now that this country is making progress, representatives want to take it all away by defining a businesses’ discrimination as religious?

NO!

I’ve done something most Christians never do–read the bible.

It’s full of discriminatory practices. Name a group and they’re in the bible being persecuted–unless they are heterosexual men of a specific race pleasing to god.

One step forward, two steps back?

Thank you for this. Caricaturized quote aside, as a former conservative turned liberal, it is nice to hear a rational argument made by a conservative. Voices like yours need to be heard, because the crazy conservatives often seem to be only ones out there. I may not agree, but you gave me a way to seriously consider your point of view.

Or that you only treat TRUE Catholic patients. 😉

Is it not part of separation of church and state that a church can preform whichever marriage ceremonies it wants to (which doesn’t necessarily mean these marriages are legally recognized if the couple didn’t fill out the appropriate paperwork)? Churches can decide they only want to marry couples who are both members or the church (or require that at least one of them be a member), or ask that they attend church marriage classes, or refuse to marry a couple they believe hasn’t been following church teachings (ex-living together before marriage, previously divorced, etc). If they can currently do all this now, why do they believe that somehow changing the gender of one member of the couple will nullify all this? The whole point to the marriage equality movement is that the government cannot discriminate in terms of handing out legal contracts, not to force churches into changing their doctrine/forcing straight people into gay marriages (which is what you’d think was happening based upon the reactions of some opponents to same-sex marriage).

As far as trying to weasel around non-discrimination laws in terms of business, that’s a non-starter. If you’re offering your services to the public, then you must serve all of the public (well, of course if you’re selling something regulated like alcohol or guns or something, obviously the laws need to be followed). Maybe a business could find some members-only way around this (I don’t really know the specifics and laws surrounding businesses that run on a membership basis, like Sam’s Club or exclusive country clubs or whatever). Perhaps their tune would change once they realize this law could be used as a basis to refuse service to Christians (after all, there could be some Jewish or Muslim business owners who feel that their religion dictates they should only serve other Jewish or Muslim people-which, of course, I’m sure we’d never hear the end of it, despite the fact that their law allowed it; somehow it still wouldn’t be their fault). Anti-discrimination law protects everyone (and if there are certain groups you hate so much that it kills you inside to serve them, then perhaps you shouldn’t be a business owner). Maybe it’s hard to see that it is helping you when you are the majority, but believe me, if that ever changes in the future, you will very much wish those protections were still in place.

I have no respect for tradition for tradition’s sake- if a tradition is doing bad stuff that outweighs the good stuff, chuck it. Sometimes the status quo is so bad you need to toss it out and start over.

I agree. My main source of reticence in this regard practically is, somewhat ironically analogous to social privilege, it is often very difficult to realize exactly what value is being added by something deeply entrenched in the social structure because it’s so integrated as to be invisible; it won’t be missed until it’s gone. So I’m leery of facial claims that the bad outweighs the good just based on obvious effects.

I suspect that unobvious effects can be quite profound. Since it is only a suspicion, it’s a cause for precaution, not dispositive against the change as a whole. It becomes worth it to check whether it is an effect that can be handled prophylactically, or mitigated through process; else you’ll run into situations where a child (in the above linked example re: poly-marriage) is part of the poly-family and happens to be unlucky enough to have two parents/guardians who are anti-vaxxers and one who insists (s)he get vaccinated, and courts never reach the merits of the argument because the temptation is to resort to disposition by democracy. Courts and judges are a finite resource; a lateral consequence of the complications of poly-marriage is a sharp increase in the complexity of the cases being decided (as you yourself pointed out), but unless the resources of the court are increased, which is not a trivial undertaking–good judges don’t grow on trees–that effect will be practically relieved by courts looking to shortcut those complexities, which is the true consequence of introducing those complexities without systemic compensation for them.

In contrast, one of the most irritating things about the “something” that Democrats needed to get passed (which sort of reminds me of old saw “do something, even if it’s wrong!”) is the promises that couldn’t get kept; the side-effects that were predicted by critics that were swept under the rug instead of addressed. First, promises that a mandate-and-penalty structure wouldn’t be necessary. (Whoops.) Then the promises that you’d get to keep your doctors (Err.) But probably the biggest whopper told, that premiums wouldn’t go up for the “vast majority”, goes to the heart of the problem. The particular heedlessness I’m accusing Democrats of (and why I don’t subscribe to the “just do something, anything” approach) is that in their rush to do something, they are being cavalier (and more than a little disingenuous) with the nasty heart of politics: that it is, in the end, about picking winners and losers.

Every system with finite resources has winners and losers. The way those winners and losers are picked is what distinguishes one system from another. We’ve always rationed health-care, simply because health-care (doctors, nurses, medication, diagnostic tools, hospital beds, prophylactic education) is finite and any rational actor has a functionally infinite demand for consuming it; it is never strictly rational at any point not to consume as much health care as you can, though obviously IRL there are some practical limitations to this effect. The prior system, not to put too fine a point on it, rationed health care based on wealth; the raw ability to pay for heath care as an assortment of products offered through the market. Now, there are several philosophical and economic objections to this way of doing things, and most of them are brutally incisive; economically, health care distribution through the health insurance market resembles almost textbook market failure, because perverse incentives (and functionally infinite demand) put upward pressure on costs that do not increase efficiency of distributions; philosophically it edges uncomfortably close to a cultural commitment to value wealthy lives as inherently more valuable and worth preserving (and improving the quality of) than poorer ones.

So they picked a new one. But then tried to tell everyone, in essence, that there would be no losers in the new distribution, which is either Polyanna to a scary extent (“…I got this! Here, hold my beer…”) or just a deception. If you add forty million new underwritten consumers of health care to the system by whatever means, it will obviously have an effect on them (and on a personal level, I’m happy about that particular effect, because I will be one of them; yay!) but will also have an effect on the folks who already had access to care, and part of that effect will be turning some of those people into the new health care losers, who will be able to consume much less health care than they formerly could. Some of them will die that would have continued living under the old distribution, but all the tears shed for those who were dying–the ones we need to save NOW!–under the last regime are suddenly dry for these new losers. Doctors and hospital beds don’t grow on trees either.

But do you really think we could have had coverage available for everyone in the two to four years the PPACA is going to take to get fully ramped up? I don’t.

Eventually, though, the piper is paid. I personally suspect that these effects are going to become more significant when the small business exchange is rolled out, which is why (again, I suspect) it keeps getting kicked down the road; the unintended consequences we were all assured would not transpire are amplified and multiplied in the that context, but this piece of the system is the piece without which the system will certainly collapse; on that everyone agrees.

And it really bothers me since this attempt will amount to the first time in about a decade I will personally have access to health care in any significant amount (I have little patience for schadenfreude and less for blame); it shouldn’t be about who was right or wrong and who should take blame, it should be about how instead of doing something NOW we should do something RIGHT, even if it is more incremental than the shiny promise of a complete solution. If the only component of PPACA that could have been passed was the medicare/medicaid expansion, that would have been an unvarnished good that would have helped hundreds of thousands of the people that were the targets of the imperative to “fix this thing” in the first place; since the bill passed with no Republican support anyway, there is little and less excuse why Democrats couldn’t have done the thing that would have helped with little blowback and none of the systemic uncertainty. Then the resource problems could be addressed in tandem; hundreds of thousands of new patients means, hey, we need to expand subsidies for medical education (as doctors take a while to mature on the vine; it’s not an instant effect) or hey, we need more hospitals (takes time to build them, too).

Which, incidentally, would have had the added effect of not using up all of Obama’s political capital that could have been effectively spent elsewhere (like, say, reproductive rights; my rather more-liberal-than-me partner is quite furious that he “blew his load” on health care and so laterally sold women down the river on abortion and contraceptive care; no Freedom of Choice Act because–hey, a theme–political influence is an exhaustible resource that needs to be rationed and spent proportionately to the policy outcomes expected), instead of consuming like a black hole his entire first–and worrisome signs point to his entire second–term in consequence.

But discrimination isn’t always so easily divided into those two categories. Many types of discrimination are arbitrary in execution even if they are philosophically supportable by some end, because line-drawing is an inherently arbitrary exercise; a sixteen but not a fifteen-year-old is capable of consenting to have sex, a woman in the first trimester but not the second trimester may choose to abort a fetus, and so forth. Many times, the drawing of these lines leads to patently unjust outcomes on a case-by-case basis, and they definitely deprive people of choices or experiences they otherwise would have. But they are neither akin to judgments based on personal taste or sentiment, nor are they usually themselves predicated on prejudiced reasoning.

Sucks but this is America. I have no doubt that this stupid bill will pass into law with flying colors.

Whaaaaaaaaa! I lost a democratic election…. TYRANY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“They just happen to appear together, and it’s a mystery why.”

I think innate tribalistic tendencies coupled with a normalization of violence towards out groups is enough of a ‘root cause’ to explain both and to explain why they commingle in the same individuals.

This human problem with identity (and group identity) is a big part of why I’m so endlessly anti TCC and Lester’s violent rhetoric even when the targets are abstract or ‘deserving’.

It doesn’t work. It’s been tried. The net impact becomes segregation as the ‘whites only’ businesses group together out of a shared customer base. This then repeats for each discriminated group. As minorities have less political power, resources and population, the minority sections (ghettos?) tend to hit downward economic spirals.

I lost my ability to browse the internet without government watching me… TYRANY!!!!!

I lost the ability to not be assassinated by the government without at least judicial oversight… TYRANY!!!!!

I can be taken away and indefinitely detained without due process… TYRANY!!!!!

I can’t make a phone call without the government knowing where I made it, who I talked to and for how long… TYRANY!!!!!

I can keep going, this shit is easy…

Not much of a mystery at proximate correlation level, given the work of Duckett, Sidanius, and Altemeyer.