Quote:
Originally Posted by detbuch
Be careful Jim. the First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. But if the free exercise of your religion, AS YOU SEE FIT, conflicts with laws that pertain to other people's rights, then those laws can supersede your practice. Most religious practices don't go that far, but there are some far out ones that encroach on the rights to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness (a.k.a. right to property) of others. So the practice of religion is not seen as a right to do so in all your interactions with the rest of society. It is more normally seen as practiced in your strictly personal or religious settings.
What is so interesting to me in the discussion of this case is how we have so narrowed the scope of rights we retained by the Constitution's limitation of government that they are minimized into a small scope of a few amendments. Madison didn't originally want to include a Bill of Rights for that very reason. The VAST RESIDUUM of rights that were ours in Madison's unamended version did not require a Bill of Rights. He feared that they would become the list of only those rights we posses. That is basically what has happened. We should not have to be pointing to the first amendment to be allowed to speak freely or to be free to practice our religion, or other amendments to bear arms, or the whole limited laundry list of amended guaranteed rights. EVERYTHING that was not given to the limited power of government, before the Bill of Rights was included, was retained by the people and the States. Almost all of that has been vanquished, and we cling to a few of the remaining Bill of Rights.
That we are having a discussion of what is or isn't discrimination, or whether we should be allowed to say no, or that we must bake a cake for anybody who asks us is so far from our founding principles that we are like a foreign country compared to the original U.S.A.
Discrimination in its broadest sense is a process that delineates who we are as individuals. It is a primary facet of freedom. Ownership of property and how it is disposed is also a primary facet of freedom and was bound with the pursuit of happiness in the eyes of the Founders. The debate should not be if we have those rights, but how little the government can intrude on them. Without those rights what are we but minions of the State? And more than half of our people accept that.
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"if the free exercise of your religion, AS YOU SEE FIT, conflicts with laws that pertain to other people's rights, then those laws can supersede your practice"
Correct. To the extreme, I cannot perform human sacrifices on religious grounds. And this conflict (the baker's right to freedom of religion, versus the couple's right to avoid discrimination) is what makes this interesting to me.
The judge, in this case, said that the couple has the right to not "be hurt for who they are". That's absurd. There is no right to not have your feelings hurt. Teasing is not against the law. WHat the Westboro Baptist Cjurch does, is at least as hurtful, but courts have said that's protected.