Continuing the media firestorm of the last few days, George Stephanopoulos spent over 11 minutes today on ABC’s “This Week” browbeating Indiana Gov. Mike Pence over the meaning of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act the governor had just signed, and the governor spent the entire 11 minutes refusing to say what the Act plainly says, that individuals and businesses, in the name of religious liberty, may discriminate against members of the LGBT community by, for example, declining to provide bakery or florist services for gay weddings.
Such today is the dishonesty of our politics, on both sides, that those who defend religious liberty cannot or will not speak plainly, while those who defend anti‐discrimination measures—like Bill Clinton, who signed the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and Barack Obama, who was an Illinois state senator when that state’s religious freedom act was passed unanimously—cannot bring themselves to say that they are limiting religious liberty—assuming the media would ever ask them to say that.
Doubtless spurred by the upcoming NCAA “Final Four” games in Indianapolis, we have here, of course, the continuation of the hysteria that followed the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision last year, which upheld the right of the deeply religious owners of that chain of stores to refrain from paying for abortifacients for their employees, as was required under the administration’s interpretation of Obamacare. (See Cato’s brief in that case, and some of my thoughts on the issue here and here.) “Hysterical” is no overstatement: ABC News reports today that Seattle’s mayor wants to prohibit city employees from traveling to Indiana. Why stop there? Prohibit travel across the U.S., where the federal law is in force.
In truth, we have in this Act the analogue of what we see every day in the area of free speech, which the left assiduously and rightly defends—but this is religion, and for the left, that’s another matter. Just as we defend a person’s right to say what he pleases, which is not the same as defending what he says, so too here we can defend a person’s right to discriminate on the basis of his religious beliefs without defending those beliefs or the actions they may require of a believer. As one more sign of how modern liberals have turned the Constitution on its head, they would have the statutory rights created by our anti‐discrimination law trump the constitutional rights the First Amendment was ratified to protect. I discuss those issues in much greater depth here.
