Indiana's RFRA: The Fallout, Part I | National Catholic Reporter

Indiana's RFRA: The Fallout, Part I | National Catholic Reporter by MSW. MGB: The Civil Rights Act is fairly, no private discrimination for an open business.  If a bakers sensibilities are violated that easily, then she can form a boutique business by referral only with no store front.  The RFRA, of course, is about the government not taking action against people whose religious ritual takes them outside law or regulaiton - like smoking marijuana (won't be a problem soon), eating Peyote (nice if that was ditto) or sacrificing a chicken (save me a thigh).



I doubt the framers ever intended it to be a way for Hobby Lobby to object to birth control measures that it feels are abortive (by the way, life begins at gastrulation, so both Hobby Lobby and the Church are wrong).    The last two also claim the ability to not just avoid matters violating their own conscience rights - but week to impose their consciences on the people who work with/associate with them.  That is not religious freedom, it is religious power.



The question of coopeeration with evil is an interesting one.  Lets settle it - getting married is never evil, gay or straight.  In that hypothetic confessional of a bakery employee, I would not assuage her conscience about baking the cake - but would prick it about why she considers what the clients are doing is an evil act.  Gay sex is not evil if you are gay and stick to one person.  Spending a life with another person in love and care (because sex is at most one percent of one to three days week) is a glorious experience - one that is not to be denigrated by bakers or by Catholic Hospitals - the latter of which created the gay marriage crisis because they thought letting the long time companion in (let alone have them be the decision maker) was cooperation with evil.  It wasn't.  They were doing the evil.



Cake bakers need to bake their cakes and if gay marriage offends you (not good, but you), then do not stock or offer to order the cake topper, apologize that this is new for you and the gay couple (or the more gay plannier) will likely understand and get it themselves.  By the way, turnabout is fair play.  I have quite a few Facebook friends and political friends who are Atheists.  If one of them is a baker, florist, caterer, whatever, do they have a conscience right to not serve a Catholic (see cooperation with peodophilia as there reason) ordination or wedding?  If you say yes to one, seems you have to say yes to the other - except that the atheist probably would not think of such bad behavior - even if it is not in any reference to sin.



People do not go out of their way to do evil, with rare exceptions.  Even abortionists mostly do so out of concern for their female patients.  They are simply blind to the rights or even the moral existence of the first trimester embryos involved - and they are a bit leary of the second trimester abortions - which are not performed lightly.



Bishops transferring pedophile priests?  That is evil.  I want liberal Catholics to pay attention to that (and they largely are), not to cake bakers.  Indeed, many of us think that all this attention to birth control is a deflection from attention to the latter issue.  Indeed, I suspect many of those Bishops who are so adamanent about religious freedom believe that they have a religious freedom right to discipline these priests as they see fit.  The answer to that is no.