I came across a quote by G.K. Chesterton recently that I think has some bearing on the latest fad for "Religious Freedom" Laws giving businesses the right to discriminate -- sorry, to Uphold Their Deeply-Held Religious Convictions. He said that just because you have the right to do a thing, doesn't mean that it is the right thing to do.
I suspect that he was paraphrasing a quote from St. Paul, which I remember learning as "All things are Lawful, but not all things are helpful."
Wait, what does St. Paul have to do with anything? Didn't he hate gays? Well, the people who hate gays ceratinly like to quote him, but he devoted much more of his writing to the subject of Christian Liberty.
All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient; all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not. (1 Corinthians 10:23 KJV)
"Everything is permissible" -- but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible" -- but not everything is constructive. (NIV)
Paul was writing here specifically on the subject of Food that has been Sacrificed to Idols, which apparently was a thing in the Greco-Roman culture of his era. You could donate meat or foodstuffs to your local temple as an offering, and whatever surplus the temple didn't use would be sold in the market. Under Jewish law, such foods, offered to pagan deities, was considered unclean, even if they were kosher otherwise.
When they Apostles of the Early Church were debating whether Gentile converts needed to follow the Law of Moses, they came up with a compromise where Gentiles were merely required to follow a few basic moral guidelines, one of which was the thing about Food Sacrificed to Idols. (Acts chapter 15)
Paul had a problem with that, because according to the Gospel as he understood and taught it, Salvation was a Gift of God, independent of what Mosaic Laws we follow, and that the Christian was free of the burdens of the Law. So how do we square this with the requirement about Food and Idols? In 1 Corinthians, Paul does some delicate tap-dancing around this subject.
He says that yes, under the Gospel, it is permissible to do so. But before you do it, you ought to consider if your action, although permissible for you, might give offence to somebody else.
To which the "Religious Freedom" people are saying "Yes! It may be legal for gays to marry, but it offends me! So they shouldn't do it!"
But the principle works the other way too. Paul can be problematic for us, because he is not really big on Rights. In his view, the Christian ought to be able to willingly forego his rights for the benefit of others. In a famous passage from Philippians, he writes:
Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant... (Philippians 2:5-7 NIV)
(Jesus makes a similar point in the story of the Two Drachma Fish in Matthew 17: technically, he says, he ought to be exempt from the Temple Tax, but he will willingly pay it anyway so as not to give offence.)
The "Religious Freedom" people are bleating about their Rights, and it is their right to do so. But how are they going to use those rights?
Some years back, I remember reading a story told by one of our Kossacks; it might have been Navy Vet Terp; (he will, I hope, correct me if I get the story wrong). He once was assigned to be the driver for a prominent rabbi who was visiting his town. During the visit, the rabbi was a guest at a luncheon, where the group hosting it thoughtlessly served ham sandwiches. The rabbi discreetly removed the ham from his sandwich and just ate the bread. When the driver later asked him if it was kosher for him to do so, since the contact with the pork would have made the bread unclean too, the rabbi replied that he felt embarrassing his hosts by making a big stink about it would be the greater sin.
He had the right to do so, but doing so would not have been right.