22 Republican senators (including Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Orrin Hatch), led by Mike Lee (R-Utah), are trying for a 3rd time to shepherd the “First Amendment Defense Act” (FADA) through Congress.
Using the 1st amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion, FADA would codify legal discrimination against members of the LGBT community, as well as anyone having sex outside of marriage.
It is an “anti-discrimination” law that would legalize discrimination.
The bill’s language is classically Orwellian. It states that FADA will “ensure that the Federal Government shall not take any discriminatory action” against those who excuse their own discriminatory actions as a requirement of their religious faith.
In other words, under the guise of “protecting opponents of same-sex marriage,” FADA will legalize discrimination against LGBT people, including heterosexuals guilty of fornication.
There are so many things wrong with this effort, both in its motivation and execution, it is hard to know where to begin.
Not too many years ago, identical “religious liberty” arguments were the foundation stones supporting racist Jim Crow laws throughout this country. Business owners could legally refuse service to black people and get away with it, because their discrimination expressed a “deeply held” religious conviction.
The passage of time has not improved the fatally flawed logic behind FADA. Nor has it sweetened the discriminatory stench clinging to its proponents.
Neither can it hide the blatant avarice lying at the root of this legislation. For it is largely motivated by the love of money.
Reading the bill reveals that, without exception, every example of potential, government “discriminatory action” – the threats to religious freedom that FADA aims to defend against – concerns maintaining an organization’s tax exempt status or other government financial benefits.
In other words, the goal of FADA is to ensure that no one will lose their religiously-based tax breaks, while exercising their right to indulge in religiously-based discrimination.
What hypocrites religious people can be, especially when fighting to protect the preferential status granted by a government tax exemption.
Such people, who insist on defending their place at the public trough, should be expected to keep the same public rules as everyone else. If they don’t like it, there is a simple solution: surrender your tax exemption.
Furthermore, the renewed push for FADA is another example of the Religious Right’s persistent lust for social and political power. It is a quest for control. Not simply to have a place in the public square, but to control access to the public square.
It is another chapter in the Right’s continuing desire for a new age of Christendom. In Christendom, the Christian church holds sway over who is in, who is out, and who plays by which rules. As expressed by FADA, Christians would implement a bizarre misapplication of church discipline to those living outside the church. (I know, my theological slip is showing. I do believe that the ancient, and entirely Biblical, prohibition against same-sex intimacy is correct and remains legitimate.)
Granted, the courts will continue to have difficult debates on the legal status of the numerous, and highly variable, religious freedom claims brought before them. But there is no Biblical foundation to the claim being made by certain Christians that faith in Jesus requires them to have no business dealings with LGBT people.
That is a self-righteous distortion of Christian witness.
The apostle Paul confronted this very misapplication of church discipline in 1 Corinthians 5:9-13. Some members of the church misunderstood Paul’s earlier warning to remain separate from “sexually immoral people.” They mistook him to mean that they couldn’t do business or associate with people outside the church who lived at variance with Paul’s ethical teaching.
However, every Greco-Roman city in Paul’s day was filled with people living any number of alternative, “immoral” lifestyles (as defined by Christian teaching). It was virtually impossible to conduct any type of successful business, including Paul’s own ventures as a traveling tent-maker, without striking deals with such “immoral” customers.
Here is Paul’s correction to the Corinthian mistake:
I did not mean for you to stop associating with the people of this world who are immoral…In that case you would have to leave this world…What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.
Only a racist, discriminatory, judgmental religion fears compromising its moral values by allowing the faithful to rub shoulders and do business with those unlike themselves.
The 1st amendment already protects that sort of religious bigotry. There is no law against being a religious white supremacist. But neither should there be a law guaranteeing the tax-exempt status of religious bigots who trample on the laws protecting equal access to the public square for everyone else.
