Most of us are probably familiar with this:
It's perhaps the most famous scene in perhaps the best fake documentary ever made, Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap. The scene is hilarious and painful at the same time, as Christopher Guest's clueless, faux-profound guitarist Nigel Tufnel labors to explain to Reiner's deadpan documentarian Marty DiBergi why the fact that the dials on Tufnel's amplifier "go up to eleven" is a really, really big deal.
Of course it's obvious to anyone who knows anything about audio electronics -- and even a lot of people who don't -- that the numerals printed on the faceplate to which a potentiometer is attached are just reference marks, wholly arbitrary, and actually tell us nothing about how much power the amp actually has, how those potentiometers regulate that power, and so forth. Tufnel's amp would be just as loud if the numeral 10 -- or anything else, for that matter -- were printed on the faceplate at the dial's clockwise stop position instead of 11. Having this obvious fact pointed out to him by DiBergi, Tufnel pauses for a few seconds before simply stating, again, as if it still actually means something, "These go to eleven."
Then, there's this:
This scene is longer and more painful, and it's not from a fake documentary. Here we have Arizona state senator and gubernatorial candidate Al Melvin playing the role of Nigel Tufnel, trying to explain to CNN's Anderson Cooper that the state's Jim-Crow-for-the-Gays bill, SB1062, actually "goes up to 11" ... er, "is a religious freedom bill" whose intent is to "protect religious freedom." Cooper, in the DiBergi role, doesn't buy it, repeatedly points out the obvious reasons why, and Melvin can only respond with long pauses followed by "Something something religious freedom something something."
Whether you believe that SB1062 and other such legislation making the rounds in various states is "not about discrimination, it's about religious freedom," well, that's up to you. Melvin, certainly, is not very convincing here. Maybe even less so than Nigel Tufnel. I think what this comparison illustrates is that people like Melvin and others who are defending these measures as being purely "about religious freedom" are not doing themselves, let alone the actual cause of actual religious freedom, any favors.
I'd be willing to bet there aren't a whole lot of Daily Kos readers who actually believe that SB1062 and its like are actually or in any way "about religious freedom." The motivations behind, and potential impact, of these proposed laws have been discussed ad nauseam here and elsewhere, so I'm not going to go there.
We would all agree, I assume, that "religious freedom" does not include treating other people like crap just because your imaginary friend says you should hate them. When we say people should be "free" or be "allowed" to "exercise their religion" or "practice their faith" or whatever, we are not talking about deliberate and otherwise-unjustifiable mistreatment of others, let alone whole categories of people.
We can debate whether refusing to provide a particular customer with the goods and services which one otherwise offers openly and unconditionally to the general public, for no reason other than some characteristic of that customer being somehow inconsistent with one's unverifiable, unfalsifiable, subjective "beliefs," constitutes "mistreatment." (This is probably the nexus of legitimate disagreement on this issue.) I think anyone who's ever been on the receiving end would call it that. I'd venture to think that anyone who wouldn't call it that has never been, and knows (s)he never would be, on the receiving end.
"Religious freedom" means you're free to obey your religion, not to enforce it. Neither does it include a "right" to subject all of society, via the law, to the rules, tenets, restrictions or commandments of your religion, nor to have all of society's laws, and all of the responsibilities and obligations they place upon you and everyone else, be consistent with your personal "beliefs."
Because most people understand that, the problem with the argument that Melvin and others are making here is that it simply sounds phony, and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that's because it is phony. It's as phony as Nigel Tufnel's waxing poetic about the number 11 being etched on his amplifier. By repeating and insisting that something is "about religious freedom" when it obviously isn't, Melvin makes the phrase "religious freedom" seem just as trite, hollow and meaningless as the number 11 on Tufnel's amp, and "that extra push over the cliff" that it supposedly gives him onstage.
There are any number of ways that measures like SB1062 can backfire on those who purport or seek to benefit from them, which we will see if any of these bills actually get passed, signed into law, and tested by real people in real-life situations for any number of personal and political purposes. In attempting to elevate "religious freedom" by "protecting" it and "allowing" it to be "exercised" and "practiced" in this way, a way that is so obviously phony and disingenuous and mean-spirited and hurtful and destructive, people like Melvin can only undermine and undercut what "religious freedom" actually is, and actually means.
It's not just that they're giving religion, and religious people generally, a bad name, creating a stereotype that really doesn't need to be created and which nothing good can come from creating. It's that using a term so frivolously only serves to water it down. In using a term that should be so fraught with meaning, and with positive connotations, to paper over an agenda and intentions that are so clearly at odds with that meaning and those connotations, and doing it in a way that is so transparently dishonest and utterly unable to withstand scrutiny, Melvin et al. are not only stripping the term of its meaning but giving it a whole new meaning that they certainly don't intend. They're going a long way toward making "religious freedom" synonymous with discrimination, the very thing they say they're trying to avoid.
Nigel Tufnel's vainglorious boasting about his amp going up to 11 only serves to reinforce, rather than dispel, what practically everyone else already knows: An amp is just an amp. What makes an amp special, if anything, is how it's made and what it's made of, not what numerals are etched around the potentiometer dials. Putting the number 11 on an amp doesn't make the amp better, and it certainly doesn't make the guitarist better. Disguising a discrimination bill as "a religious freedom bill" doesn't make the bill better, and doesn't make its supporters or beneficiaries better.
Saying "this bill is about religious freedom" is like saying "this amp goes up to 11." It sounds good, it makes the speaker feel better about himself, but ultimately it is at best meaningless, at worst completely phony and insulting to the intelligence.