By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--March 27, 2015
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His action followed two days of intense pressure from opponents — including technology company executives and convention organizers — who fear the measure could allow discrimination, particularly against gays and lesbians. Pence and leaders of the Republican-controlled General Assembly called those concerns a "misunderstanding." "This bill is not about discrimination," Pence said, "and if I thought it legalized discrimination I would have vetoed it." Senate Bill 101 prohibits state or local governments from substantially burdening a person's ability to exercise their religion — unless the government can show that it has a compelling interest and that the action is the least-restrictive means of achieving it. It takes effect July 1. Although the bill does not mention sexual orientation, opponents fear it could allow business owners to deny services to gays and lesbians for religious reasons.The canard about diners refusing to serve lunch to gays is simply nonsense. The bill is not designed to allow any such thing, and a restaurant owner who tries it and attempts to use the bill as a justification is pretty much guaranteed to lose in court. I know that because a similar bill was proposed in Michigan last year and opponents made the same claims. I interviewed the authors of the bill for my Detroit News column and they told me a) like Indiana's bill, it was modeled almost exactly on the federal law that Bill Clinton signed in 1993; and b) subsequent court rulings based on that law make clear that you can't just tell gay people to get out of your restaurant because you don't like gay people. There is no compelling religious freedom involved in such an action. You can't just invent a religion and claim it requires you to kick gay people out. (And no, the Bible doesn't require you to do that.) Opponents of the Michigan bill - which died in the Legislature's lame-duck session in 2014 - even tried to claim it would permit an EMT to refuse to provide homosexuals with emergency services. That claim is so ridiculous it's astonishing anyone believes it.
The EMT example is the most idiotic of all. For one thing, there is a very specific federal law — the Emergency Medical Treatment And Labor Act of 1986 — that requires EMTs to provide emergency assistance to anyone who has the need, even if they can’t pay. Again, the RFRA contains nothing that seeks to circumvent that. (And if it did, it would be struck down by the first court that had the chance, and properly so.)So why do gay marriage activists make these bogus claims? Simple. It's much easier than explaining why you think government should be able to force people to provide a service that truly conflicts with their faith. The Christian baker, florist, photographer or wedding chapel owner being compelled by government to celebrate gay weddings is a figure the public can identify with and support, as the polls cited here demonstrate. So rhetorically, you take them out of the equation and pretend the bill is designed to empower 21st Century equivalents of the southern lunch counter proprietors who refused to serve blacks. And once you've convinced enough people of this nonsense, you pressure major organizations like the NCAA to pull their events out of Indiana. Salesforce.com has already announced it will no longer send people to Indiana. All this is designed to use economic pressure to do what you can't do with an honest look at the substance of the issue in question. If gay marriage activists really believed in the worthiness of their cause, they would present the issue honestly. The way they deal with bills like this one tells you that they don't really believe they can persuade the public unless they lie. The public should understand that.
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