Those who argue for the right to discriminate on religious grounds are avoiding some nasty history.
Cross posted from Pruning Shears.
Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act (either RFRA or RIFRA, sometimes even in the same article) has prompted supporters to insist it's not about bigotry at all. As you might expect, the further to the right you get, the more obvious the bigotry is. Erick Erickson railed against gays and invoked Satan, while Michael van der Galien positively trembled at the thought of Tim Cook shoving his stiff, thick, beautiful anti-discrimination laws down his throat.
David Brooks, meanwhile, tried out the thoughtful conservative approach - fretting over an environment in which it's generally believed that "Claims of religious liberty are covers for anti-gay bigotry....If orthodox Christians are suddenly written out of polite society as modern-day Bull Connors, this would only halt progress, polarize the debate and lead to a bloody war of all against all." Later on he does acknowledge that such liberty is not untrammeled: "Discrimination is always wrong. In cases of actual bigotry, the hammer comes down." But that just raises the obvious question: Does the RFRA allow discrimination?
Well, it allows citizens there to break the law claiming religious belief, then claim the RFRA as a defense. Its defenders point out that it can be used in all kinds of circumstances, but frankly that comes across as a little slippery and disingenuous. The politics surrounding its passage make it pretty clear the RFRA is about letting those who live in counties with anti-discrimination laws discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Efforts to obscure that notwithstanding, this seems to be well inside the discrimination wrong/hammer comes down area - yet Brooks is more concerned about the social status of the ones doing the discriminating.
He seems strangely detached from the issue; near the end of his column he writes about the controversy as "philosophic clashes," as though it's all an academic issue - not one that will have an impact on actual lives. If he knows anyone who has good reason to anticipate being affected by the law, he hides it well. (Lives being turned into abstractions is something of a feature in Brooks' writing.)
Erickson and company, meanwhile, dispensed with Brooks' ambiguities by going for a pure religious freedom argument. They don't bother considering discrimination at all. People have freedom to run businesses according to their stated religious beliefs, period. Which of course opens a can of worms that none of them have cared to look into yet: Such a strictly principle-based approach could be used to justify racial bias as well.
That's not a purely theoretical concern, either. In the not-too-distant past religious belief has been used to justify segregation and bans on interracial marriage. (To say nothing of the biblical justifications for slavery even earlier.) So the question for those that put religious liberty above all is, what about those issues as well? If religious belief is a sufficient claim to discriminate against gays, why is it not also sufficient to discriminate against blacks?
If conservatives think it should be illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, does that mean they support what Erickson calls people "forcing you to violate your conscience"? There are religiously devout people who sincerely believe in, and think there is a sound scriptural basis for, racial separation. If religious liberty really is supreme then no one should be able to prevent a restaurant run by such a person from having a whites-only counter, right?
If they don't believe that, then they believe some level of state coercion is acceptable - forcing, say, restaurants to seat all customers and not just whites. The question then becomes, what level of coercion is acceptable? But they don't want to have that conversation because once they start it they can no longer cry about liberty and freedom. It puts them where Brooks is, and Brooks isn't in a very tenable position either.
Loudly proclaiming one's love of pure, unadulterated freedom and liberty sounds great, but it often seems to end up in some pretty ugly places. As Roy Edroso pointed out, Rand Paul doesn't seem to have made his peace with 50 year old civil rights legislation for much the same reason. If you make any concessions to the terrible ways it can work out in reality, you lose the soaring rhetoric. Hang on to the rhetoric, and even if you're not a bigot you'll have to spend a lot of time defending them. That's not a good look for most people.