Marriage equality continues to hurt businesschurch fee-fees.
Freedom and liberty have a new defender. It's the Hitching Post Wedding Chapel in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which insists that having to accommodate same-sex couples will make a mockery of their deeply religious beliefs as to who should or should not be very religiously hitched and to which post. So with the help of the usual freedom-lovers, they're
making a preemptive stand.
The complaint suggests that because the city will only prosecute businesses who oppose same-sex marriages, it constitutes “rank viewpoint discrimination.” They seek to have the law declared unconstitutional, at least as applied to them, for violating their rights to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal protection under the law, and due process of law. As ordained ministers with the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, they worry that they risk discipline from the Church if they perform a wedding not sanctioned by their beliefs.
Ah, the perils of running a public business that has to serve all comers, even gay people and ethnic people and women who wear pants instead of dresses. How
will the righteous survive?
Indeed, the Hitching Post is a for-profit business, but with help from [Alliance Defending Freedom], the Knapps have been gearing up for this challenge for some time by redefining their business in more religious terms. [...]
Jeremy Hooper notes that back in May when it was first in the news, the Hitching Post Chapel’s website said that the Knapps offered a “traditional or civil ceremony” for weddings and that they also would “perform wedding ceremonies of other faiths.” Though the website still said as much as recently as October 9, 2014, the old language has been scrubbed and the Hitching Post now only offers “a traditional Christian wedding ceremony.”
This is the new battle line. We used to have a fairly clear grasp of what was a church and what was not a church; the new trend is to assert that your business is both a for-profit company
and a religious institution, depending on who's asking. It's not just wedding venues and flower shops, now you have deeply religious hobby supply stores and God-seeking furniture factories and presumably even things like Fracking For Jesus, why not, which will be regular fracking but with the insistence that the chemicals injected into the ground are God's Love so everyone else has to shut up.
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I honestly don't know how this one will turn out. The theory that craft supply stores ought to be able to restrict the medical rights of their female employees if their owners have the Deep Spiritual Belief that those women might be sluts has opened up the door to, seemingly, any company being able to veto the legal rights of any employee or customer or truck driver if they can claim their religion says that person shouldn't have that established public right. If the place that sells Chinese-made pipe cleaners is now considered a corporate church, isn't a
Hitching Post at least twice as sacred?