Slashdot Mirror
Apple's Tim Cook Calls Out "Religious Freedom" Laws As Discriminatory
An anonymous reader writes It will come as no surprise that Apple's CEO Tim Cook doesn't agree with so-called religious freedom laws. Cook says, "[they] rationalize injustice by pretending to defend something many of us hold dear," and has penned an op-ed piece for The Washington Post which reads in part: "A wave of legislation, introduced in more than two dozen states, would allow people to discriminate against their neighbors. Some, such as the bill enacted in Indiana last week that drew a national outcry and one passed in Arkansas, say individuals can cite their personal religious beliefs to refuse service to a customer or resist a state nondiscrimination law. Others are more transparent in their effort to discriminate. Legislation being considered in Texas would strip the salaries and pensions of clerks who issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples — even if the Supreme Court strikes down Texas' marriage ban later this year. In total, there are nearly 100 bills designed to enshrine discrimination in state law. These bills rationalize injustice by pretending to defend something many of us hold dear. They go against the very principles our nation was founded on, and they have the potential to undo decades of progress toward greater equality."
Tim Cook has already come out as a fucking faggot. It looks like he pro discrimination since he wants to discriminate against religions (most of them) that don't like faggots.
This is another power grab by the religious right. It is connected to their efforts to restrict sex (through access to contraception, sex education, abortion, etc) and control the lives of Americans in the bedroom. But you know what? Every article, every boycott and every protest is pushing them back. Similar bills are stalling or failing. The outrage at actions like these are causing more and more Americans to leave their religion in disgust. The more we drag this bullshit into the light, the more the theocrats feel the heat.
I wonder if a Pet Store owner should be forced to sell puppies to people known to be into bestiality.
Some things need to be said...
"Religious freedom" in all its guises empowers and gives "freedom" to religious assholes and oppressors to take away the freedom of others.
Religion is a Trojan Horse for other backwards notions, like giving superstitious and ignorant people the right to silence speech they deem "offensive". The most fucked-up countries are the ones where somebody can use take arbitrary "offence", and use that office to attack somebody. E.g. the offence of "insulting a Muslim" in most Islamic countries.
Anybody propagating the idea that it should be illegal to "give offence" should be stabbed in the head, imnsho.
I just don't buy iPhones because I don't agree with the poor working conditions in Apple factories. See how that works Tim?
Either that, or "Treat others like you would like to be treated."
Honestly, the self-righteousness of the "religious" is getting to be annoying.
...someone is calling the wambulance.
If you and your religion wish to be able to discriminate against someone on the basis of your religion, then you and your religion should correspondingly lose the legal protection of being discriminated against.
If you are such a whiny idiot that you think it should be OK to say "we don't serve your kind here", then you should have no legal or moral basis to claim that someone shouldn't be able to do the same to you.
This is giving religion an extra special place in law ... protected from being discriminated against, while getting a special exemption to discriminate against someone else.
So either shut up, and accept that you have no other ways you're legally allowed to discriminate against someone ... or accept that it should also be someone else's right to refuse you because of your religion.
There is no in between, and any claims your religion is so precious as to require you receive rights nobody else has is complete crap.
Sorry, but the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIL want to have a society based on religious exceptionalism.
Which makes people who want to have religion be a special thing in law are full of shit, self entitled people, and are actually the enemies of a free and open society.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Probably strongly and vocally oppose this bill.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Are stupid.
Religion is not something innate, like sexuality or race, and it's not something that people have no choice over (disability, for example). It's something people have a choice about, and if they choose to be religious, they should have to deal with the consequences of that. Generally, I think religious people are closed minded and less intelligent, and if they were more open minded, they wouldn't obey a book blindly or believe in things that have absolutely no basis in reality (for example, God created the world 6000 years ago). It should not be a protected class like something like race is.
In short, people choose religion, so people should be able to choose discriminate against people because it.
How can one be considered "tolerant" when one does not tolerate intolerance?
How can one be considered "non-discriminatory" when one discriminates against discrimination?
1. post story to raise interest in new product being launched
2. follow up with positive feel good story about company involved
3. result - everyone aware of new product launch, have positive thoughts about the company involved = positive feelings about product
Too easy.
the very principles our nation was founded on
I love when liberals talk like this and then in the next breath bash the 2nd amendment and make up some bullshit about militias/muskets.
You can't have it both ways. You can't appeal to the founding fathers when it helps your argument and then ignore them when it doesn't. Nobody will take you seriously.
This is blow back for overreach. When we as a society conluded that we cannot employ common sense to indentify and negotiate grey areas (BECAUSE THERE ARE NO GREY AREAS!!!) like the difference between a religious wedding service provider declining to service to same-sex 'marriages' and a coffee shop refusing service to a same-sex 'couple,' people decided to legislately protect their human agency, and we may well wind up the worse for it.
A free market solution never worked in the Jim Crow south and it wont work now. Sure if you live in a big city or town, if one shop refuses to serve you, you can go to another, but what happens to a person who is in the minority who lives or visits a small town that is predominantly made up of religious bigots? There may be one gas station, one food market, one diner? Should the minority have to leave town to protect the rights of the bigoted religious majority?
Also, will the religious rights head explode when Muslims try to use their faith in the same way the Christians are trying too?
I choose who I do business with or have over my home all of the time. It's not based on religion I just don't do business with people I think are jerks.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Before people start with the "a business should be able to choose who it does business with" arguments, just remember that those arguments formed the basis for voluntary racial discrimination in the South. The only reason anti-discrimination laws exist is because there was a consistent record of abuses that could not be solved with community action alone.
IMHO the Hobby Lobby comes down to
Workers have to submit to the religious beliefs of the company's owners
And that was a decision by the Supreme Court.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Strongly held religious views should be protected here. Private businesses are not public accommodations.
if the government can compel companies to do business with people they don't want to, how long will it be before the people are compelled to do business with companies they don't want to?
lose != loose
The real issue is not freedom of religion, the real issue is freedom from religion.
In this case they may find it backfires and opens the doors to extremes such Sharia Law, as an example, or even some high growth perversion of Christianity leading to another Crusade.
Stupid right? I just think religion opens too many of the wrong kinds of doors, it should be "Freedom From Religion".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Good thing Cook doesn't make law. Religious people have the right not to have their faith mocked by being forced to admit into their midst people that do not share their beliefs.
This is all just a distraction and pandering to a political base. No business that likes money and wants to continue making money will be discriminating against anyone. Big corporations surely don't care who or what you sleep with in bed at night if you want to give them money. Small businesses can't afford to lose a sale. And if a small business decides to put their own religious beliefs in front of making money, then so be it if they go under.
This is another "look over here; be outraged!" political move by the establishment to make sure no one is looking at any of the important issues facing us on the world stage while at the same time furthering the "left/right" political divide and causing more animosity amongst the LGBT community that the "straights" are trying to oppress them (even though no one, straight, republican, or otherwise actually supports legalized discrimination).
Thou shalt not write ones nor zeros for leaders who have passed religious freedom laws.
And that, my fellow Ass Clowns of Zero Talent, is God's word.
By forcing people to engage in business with a client they would rather not have, we have crossed the line and no longer have freedom of association. Note that in the Constitution there is no "but not if you are in business" clause.
All the angst and hand wringing in the world won't change the fact that those assholes and their cake have caused enormous waves of dissent.
Maybe we can finally get rid of the whole idea of protected classes this time around and have equality for real.
Companies like Apple are turning America in hell...
I think something irreligious non-libertarians miss in these discussions is the notion of harm.
I'm guessing that they see clear harm to a gay person in having a business refuse to perform a particular service for them.
But they see no harm in forcing a religious person to choose between being faithful to God and making their living.
In reality, gay people can usually find another place to get a cake decorated, and religious people can actually write the requested message on a cake. But irreligious people are making the value judgment that the former is less tolerable than the latter.
As far as I can tell, that prioritization is itself a religious judgment. It's saying that it's more wrong to refuse to blaspheme, than to blaspheme. That strikes me as very much an Enlightenment era notion of morality.
Everyone discriminates. You choose physical / personality traits that you require in someone to date / marry / have sex with. You choose your hobbies, bands, etc. You say "I love McDonald's" or "I hate White Castle". EVERYONE DISCRIMINATES.
Business owners are supposed to (and used to) have the right to refuse service to anyone that they didn't want to work with. Then with the Civil Rights movement, they decided that for blacks to have equal rights, business owners had to lose their rights (yeah, I don't get the logic either). This issue came up recently with the cases of both a photographer and a baker being forced, under threat of fine and jail, to work for gay couples getting married when the business owners were against gay marriage for religious reasons. This law was written because of the fact that other governments in the country have been forcing people to work for others against their will. If people didn't have to be afraid of being forced to do something they find immoral, then there wouldn't have been demand for a law to protect them from it.
Instead of just allowing businesses to operate how they want and customers deciding who succeeds and who doesn't (can you imagine how fast Walmart or McDonald's would go out of business if they put up "No blacks allowed" signs?), people want to decide that by opening a business, you lose any right to decide how you live your life and who you associate with. It's idiotic, to say the least. The only reason that people currently are opposed to the "religious freedom" law is because they don't like THAT religious view. However, when this law is used to allow a black business owner to tell KKK members to go to hell and he won't serve them, maybe you'll realize that it's a two-way street.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Replace "religion" with "social justice" in your comment, and it still makes exactly the same point.
The pro-homosexuality tyrants are just as bad as the anti-homosexuality tyrants, and vice versa.
Both exhibit a total lack of tolerance, just about different things.
Both also exhibit discriminatory tendencies, just toward different things.
Those of us who aren't on either side of this think it's all pretty fucking pathetic.
I think it's very clear that the only way to ensure tolerance is that we have to make people practice toleration. We have to force people to sell things to people they don't want to sell to, lend things to people they don't want to lend to, allow patronage to people that they don't want as patrons, accept donations from people they don't want as doners, and, in general, to let any protected class to have any transaction that they desire. I think it behooves us to make government bureaucracies that enforces tolerance. I think that no intolerant person should be permitted to be on the bureaucracy, because otherwise intolerance will creep in, which will allow intolerant people to do intolerant things. In fact, that's true of all government. No unprotected class should be permitted to hold any office in the legislature, executive, or judiciary. Those people are intolerant, and we can't allow their intolerant beliefs to pass intolerant laws, enforce intolerant acts, or made intolerant decisions. Only the tolerant people should be able to force their views on others. The intolerant people have views that can be dismissed out of hand. Those views shouldn't be allowed a forum in the media, on the internet, or anywhere in public. Only tolerant views are permissible. Tolerant views should be mandatory, and anything not mandatory should be forbidden.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
I think this issue illustrates perfectly why laws are the wrong solution to the problem of prejudice. You cannot legislate people's morals and, where the law deviates from their moral beliefs, they will find a way around it. The way to tackle these sorts of issues is through education: you cannot just tell someone that discriminating against person X because they do, or are, Y is wrong you have to give them the full picture and let them come to that conclusion on their own - or sadly not as the case may be.
Obviously this takes time but ultimately it leads to a long lasting, more fundamental change in society and is far more effective than trying to force someone to behave in a particular way through threats of imprisonment or fines. All the latter does is makes (figurative) martyrs to the cause and further strengthens the resolve of those who disagree with the law making the problem worse, not better. If you disagree think of a law closer to Slashdot's field: copyright. Many see nothing morally wrong with format shifting material which is legally purchased and yet many a nation's law say otherwise. Has that affected your moral beliefs and/or your behaviour when it comes to format shifting?
Well, Jesus ate with lepers... and unlike them, the gay ain't infectious...
But then again, how could I expect Jesus to be considered a role model by bigoted assholes?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Are stupid.
And free the population of the religious oppression. Hey,that worked well in the middle east as well, didn't it? Now it's time for the ISA to be bombed.
I've always believed that gay people should be free to live the way they want and that they shouldn't have to ask anyone's permission to get married. I also believe that people should be free not to associate with them (or anybody else), if they'd prefer.
If everyone is required to think the same way, they you're not actually free. It seems though, that many people have a passionate desire to save bigots from their own bad business decisions, and would rather just give them their money blindly, without making the decision to shop elsewhere on their own. If businesses want to attempt to discriminate, in this day and age, then let them try and watch them go out of business. Prevent them from discriminating and all you're doing is saving them from themselves.
So, among all this fracas, can someone where this actually enabled discrimination?
Also, show of hands, how many knew that 20 or so other states already have the same or very similar law on teh books, and that Clinton signed the same law on the federal level.
Anyone? Anyone?
How them puppet strings feel?
So does this mean that as an anti-theist I can refuse service to those who practice religion?
As a Pastafarian can I refuse to serve noodles to those not wearing a colander?
As a Dude-ist can I refuse service to those that don't abide?
Seriously, I am curious to know how much these wingnuts have thought about the possibility that non-Christians might use this crap against them. Imagine the uproar is a Halal butcher turned away some Catholics, or a Jewish deli turned away some Baptists on religious grounds. Faux News would have an outrage-gasm.
i am vehemently opposed to these laws. if i was still a business owner, i would slap a big sign on my door that says "All are welcome". just cause you might sin differently than i do, doesn't make it ok for me to treat you differently
Did I miss something? Haven't we been all through this before? Did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 just vanish? It's pretty clear that Federal Law prohibits discrimination. Trying to dress up discrimination as Religious Freedom is farcical.
Gay advocates talk about freedom. They call it the civil rights issue of our time, invoking the Constitution, equal rights, etc. No matter what they say, however, that's all just a legally palatable cover for their real motivation: Feeling normal.
They just want the gay jokes to disappear. They just want the unspoken snarls or looks of disgust when people see them to vanish. They just want people to pause to gather the PC thing to say in social situations when they find out someone is gay. They'd probably even remove the word gay from the human lexicon altogether if they could. "We're not any different than you."
The only way that can happen is to completely tamp out any social mores that say that being gay is wrong. "Wrong" has to be made "right". "Immorality" has to be made into "equal rights". That requires rewriting millenia of fundamental religious dogma - and a very heavy, persistent, and fascist jackboot to accomplish it.
Can a songwriter refuse to write (or have a song played) for a political campaign they don't like?
Seriously not flamebait, but bigots typically heavily vote Republican.
They are tired of this black muslim socialist and want a return to the days of Bush. So put amendments and put records like these will give pastors great sermons on who God approves to run their country come election day. It works as the religious right is THEE most powerful group in this country. Even more powerful than the NRA and those who want lower taxes.
No I am not saying you are a biggot if you are a Republican moderators. But I do say the religious folks are 85% are registered republicans thanks to Jerry Falwell and Reagan who tried to persued them to leave Carter and the democratic party behind.
It works it is time get ahead at any cost including taking away the rights of others. Racist governors did the same to Blacks too to bring supporters to the polls
http://saveie6.com/
Good grief, so many people are piling on and hating Indiana for this, but they are mistaken. This is not about saying "we don't serve your kind here". This is about establishing guidelines for government to avoid reflexively punishing religious individuals over their scruples of conscience.
If you want to talk about brainless and/or dishonest liberal media, today would be the day, because the NYT, CNN, and any number of other outlets are acting like this is something new and unnecessary that Indiana is doing, when in fact the opposite is true. There has been a very similar federal law on the books since Chuck Schumer proposed it and then-President Bill Clinton signed it into law. The only reason Indiana enacted a state law equivalent is that courts have determined that the federal law doesn't protect religious individuals from non-compliance with certain local laws.
This is not to allow the local deli to refuse to serve gays, and in fact will not allow them to do so. This is to prevent bullies and jerks from picking on people who happen to be small business owners over their religion.
Example: if a Christian goes to a kosher bakery and asks for "holy cross" themed rolls for an Easter party, and the proprieters kindly offer to refer them to the secular baker down the street, should the Christian sue those dirty Jews for all they've got, and attempt to bankrupt them and destroy their business over this scruple of religious conscience? No, of course not. The Christian would be a jerk in that case. So why are so many gays being jerks about the exact same kind of thing?
The problem with all this hate disguised as religion is that it doesn't hold up. It's complete and utter hypocrisy. Homosexuality is called a sin in both Leviticus and 1 Corinthians. Leviticus and 1 Corinthians also say that tattoos are a sin. My wife and I attend an evangelical church in the south and it doesn't escape our attention that there are a great many congregants with tattoos. Especially those cute ankle and back of the neck ones... You don't see Christians up in arms about them getting married or refusing them service. In Matthew 19:9, Jesus said that a man who divorces his wife, except for adultery, and remarries is himself committing adultery. 1/3-1/2 of all divorces in the U.S. don't involve adultery, and yet do you see Christians refusing these people service or refusing the remarry them? Jesus said the second most important commandment was to "love your neighbor as yourself." It's quoted in two Gospels, Mark and Matthew. He didn't say there's an exception for homosexuals. In fact, he never said anything about homosexuals. The Christian right in this country reminds me of the Pharisees in the bible. Trying to interpret who God would judge and passing their own judgment instead of leaving the judgment to God and loving their neighbor, regardless of their neighbors sins because, after all, the bible tells us that we are all sinners.
...want people to pause to not gather the PC thing...
It's weird how some on the left are so eager to push "diversity" that they'll compromise our own liberal western values in the process of pandering to people who do not share these values.
Fair enough. Explain to us then the rational opposing position then. Explain to us the pro-discrimination position whereby we should be permitted to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, or even sexual orientation when none of those things should matter. Explain how these laws trying to push laws purporting to support "religious freedom" are actually anything other than an attempt by bigoted people to discriminate against others.
It sounds to me like you have an ideological issue with "some of the left" and are trying for some reason to justify what is plainly an attempt by right wing religious conservatives to codify bigotry into state law. 50 years ago those laws were called Jim Crow laws. This is just a later day version of separate but equal. Freedom of speech does not equal freedom to discriminate particularly on a religious basis.
Why can't we just have a simple principle:
If you offer goods and services to the public your potential customers may include those whose appearance, life style, sexual preferences, race, language and even odor you find offensive. So what - get used to it.
It's amazing how Americans don't understand the first rule of civil society : your freedoms end where mine begins.
And sometimes individual freedoms have to be restrained/curtailed for the good of Society.
http://xkcd.com/1332/
Bert
You need to make up your mind. Do you want freedom, or do you not want freedom?
There isn't a range of freedom. You can't have just "some" freedom. You either have freedom, or you do not. Even the slightest restriction means that there is no freedom.
Having freedom means that people will express ideas that you don't like. If you're a homosexual, you'll just have to suck it up and accept that some people will express that it's wrong for two people of the same gender to get married, or for a man to put his penis up another man's rectum. If you're a Christian, you'll just have to accept that some people will express that it's okay for two people of the same gender to get married, or for a man to put his penis up another man's rectum.
If any sort of restriction is imposed on either party, for whatever reason, then freedom has been completely lost.
An attempt to give one party "more" freedom ends up resulting in a total loss of freedom for everyone.
Freedom is inherently impossible in any situation where there are restrictions, no matter how small they may be.
As I live in Arkansas I actually got around to reading the bill (HB 1228) this morning. Everything people are complaining about is complete FUD. It's really quite mundane... and LOTS of other states already have similar laws on the books. It _basically_ instructs the courts to take into consideration sincerely-held religious convictions in discrimination cases except where there is an impracticality in enforcing the laws without the state encroaching on them.
This does NOT mean that teh gheys will be denied service at restaurants.
It DOES mean that I may be spared legal consequences if I decline to build a gay porn website for somebody and am sued for discrimination.
I was just reading a city in Oklahoma enabled Sharia Law to make sure gays do not have rights so the city council can be re-elected.
If Obama did this they would be screaming murder and going to the white house with pitchforks and torches. Hypocrites.
http://saveie6.com/
There's no such thing as discrimination against "personal choices".
Laws are passed all the time to restrict "choices".
Don't smoke in public buildings.
Don't drink and drive.
Don't drive without a seatbelt.
Don't drive without insurance.
Don't beat children.
Don't beat your wife (I understand you never could because of your "CHOICES" you've made.)
Discrimination against being born male or female, being born with different pigmentation or lack their of in your skin, these are things that can be discriminated against, and that is why the laws were made to assign penalties for that discrimination.
Trying to place the "CHOICE" of liking the same sex at the same level as how you were born is farcical.
The bill of rights guarantees that "Congress may pass NO law" that interferes with the freedom of religion. So sorry asshole, you cannot get a law passed that trumps religious freedom. Any laws that try to do that will fail, miserably. Like laws that say you cannot discriminate sexual orientation? Those are unconstitutional if your "choice" is based on said religious freedom.
So, as Kid Rock sings in his new album "First Kiss" .... Fuck Off And Die
So out of curiosity, are those signs that say "We reserve the right to refuse serve to anyone" legal? If they are, then why would they need to pass this law? If not, does a business have the right under ANY circumstance to refuse service to someone outside of where the law demands it (like a bartender refusing to serve an intoxicated customer)? Are businesses considered to be public and therefore must be open to everyone or are they considered private and open only to whomever the owner wants (like a private club)? I've always been curious about this
At some point your freedoms will clash with my freedoms. Who wins then, Tim?
For every person demanding that kids be taught that homosexuality is normal and natural and thus should be accepted by all (as proved by its persistence throughout history despite brutal efforts to suppress it), I'd like to submit that we - using the same criteria - teach that murder, rape, and war are LIKEWISE "normal" and "natural".
Oh wait, one is obviously "good", the other obviously "bad"? Some people might assert that homosexuality is biologically deviant and phylogenically a waste of resources, while war culls the weak.
(I'll just point out that even composing this post and the examples above was an intellectually challenging exercise, but the moment we don't TRY to understand the viewpoint of our ideological opposite - who likely has the same moral stance, just a different set of facts/priorities/filters - our arguments are bankrupt.)
Personally, I believe that racists, and homophobes, and sexists should be allowed to just do what they want, and be who they are, as long as they don't actually harm anyone. If they want to refuse service in their business, that's a commercial decision they can make, and can cheerfully live with the consequences of that choice - I mean, it's not like the internet would make it simple for the world to be informed of these choices, and the marketplace - the true democracy, with people casting votes they actually care about with their $ - can vote on whether it's anathema or ok.
-Styopa
Really, it would be funny if it weren't so sad. All of the SJWs are condemning the Indiana law, because they disapprove of the motivation behind it. However, it is nearly identical to the federal law that the SJWs applauded. The only differences are theoretical motivations behind the laws. The federal law was justified, in part, on the freedom of Native Americans to practice their religion. The Indiana law is justified, in part, on the right of businesses to refuse service when doing so would violate their religious beliefs.
The actual or hypothetical motivations behind the laws are, in the end, completely irrelevant. In practice, the law can be invoked by anyone who feels that their religious freedom is being curtailed. What's important is the content, so let's look at the laws:
The federal law, enthusiastically supported by SJWs, states: “Government may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person (1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”
The Indiana law, vehemently condemned by SJWs, states: “A governmental entity may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if the governmental entity demonstrates that application of the burden to the person: (1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”
There is no significant difference between the two. What the SJWs are objecting to are the purported motivations of the people passing the law. In short: "it's good if we do it, but bad if you do it". Pretty much textbook hypocrisy.
p.s. For those wondering why the States need their own laws, when a federal law exists: Some court case or other led to a decision that the federal law was not binding on State and local governments. This is mentioned in the Wikipedia article about the federal law.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Should a black waitress be forced to serve a group of Klansmen?
Should a child daycare provider be forced to sell services to a pedophile?
Should a chemical supplies warehouse be forced to sell bags of nitrate to someone wearing a pro ISIL shirt?
You are entirely wrong. The Hobby Lobby ruling said nothing about the workers submitting to the religious beliefs of the company owners. The workers retain full access to all medical serviced they wish. For example they are free to use their own money to buy contraception and abortion, and to buy health insurance that covers contraception and abortion. The only "right" the lost was the "right" to have the employer buy them contraception. The workers certainly have a right to be compensated for their labour (and they are!) -- but are not "submitting to the religious beliefs of their employer" by being paid their salary in cash instead of in medical services.
The only abuse here is that salary paid in cash is taxable, while salary paid in medical insurance isn't. But that is a problem created by Congress, and the solution is to remove the loophole. Decoupling health insurance from employment would automatically solve the religious liberty problem (if each workers bought their own coverage, the employer's religious beliefs wouldn't be relevant) and would mean losing your job wouldn't automatically mean you lose your insurance..
If you think the Indiana RFRA gives a business the right to discriminate based on religion then test it. Refuse to serve "Christians" and see how that works out in the courts.
It all starts at 0
How to Determine if Your Religious Liberty Is Being Threatened in Just 10 Quick Questions.
Just pick "A" or "B" for each question.
My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to go to a religious service of my own choosing.
B) Others are allowed to go to religious services of their own choosing.
2. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to marry the person I love legally, even though my religious community blesses my marriage.
B) Some states refuse to enforce my own particular religious beliefs on marriage on those two guys in line down at the courthouse.
3. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am being forced to use birth control.
B) I am unable to force others to not use birth control.
4. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to pray privately.
B) I am not allowed to force others to pray the prayers of my faith publicly.
5. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) Being a member of my faith means that I can be bullied without legal recourse.
B) I am no longer allowed to use my faith to bully gay kids with impunity.
6. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to purchase, read or possess religious books or material.
B) Others are allowed to have access books, movies and websites that I do not like.
7. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) My religious group is not allowed equal protection under the establishment clause.
B) My religious group is not allowed to use public funds, buildings and resources as we would like, for whatever purposes we might like.
8. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) Another religious group has been declared the official faith of my country.
B) My own religious group is not given status as the official faith of my country.
9. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) My religious community is not allowed to build a house of worship in my community.
B) A religious community I do not like wants to build a house of worship in my community.
10. My religious liberty is at risk because:
A) I am not allowed to teach my children the creation stories of our faith at home.
B) Public school science classes are teaching science.
If you answered "A" to any question, then perhaps your religious liberty is indeed at stake. You and your faith group have every right to now advocate for equal protection under the law.
If you answered "B" to any question, then not only is your religious liberty not at stake, but there is a strong chance that you are oppressing the religious liberties of others.
Edith Keeler Must Die
And the offense against Christians builds to a fever pitch while the crowd yells “Stop pushing your values on us!” But it’s neither Gays nor Christians doing most of the pushing. Atheists are doing the pushing against Christians. Religions other than Christian and Anti-Christian are seldom involved. Christians are going to get their pants sued off it they don't bake the cake with same sex couples. It is the plan.
There are two completely different situations in TFA:
- Clerks work for the city / county, not the feds or the courts. If they have a problem with the rules, they can challenge them or quit. If someone else is offended by the rules, their problem is with the city / county, not the clerk. The Texas clowns want to lay their responsibility on someone who has no authority to deal with it and certainly isn't being paid enough to.
- People who run a business (like a bakery) should be absolutely free to refuse service to anyone, at any time, with or without giving a reason. It's not the government's business. If a bakery wants to make cakes for government functions, they follow the government's rules. If the public doesn't like it, the business changes their policy or closes. Period. (Ignoring all the ways the government can visit "unrelated" reprisals on uncooperative subjects.)
How can anyone argue against that? I'm reminded of the small southern town I grew up in. Lots of natural beauty, and lots of rich northerners who wanted to live there. Trouble was, most of them immediately joined or created every committee, etc, they could find, ran for office, and wrote to the newspapers trying to turn their new home into the same totalitarian northeastern sewer they were supposedly escaping. It's okay to know all the answers, but preserve me from the ones who want to impose their answers on everyone else.
Fuck Apple's Tim Crook. Fuck Apple and everything associated with Apple.
Religious people have the right not to have their faith mocked...
Exactly where in US law does it say that one should be immune to mockery based on your religious choices? Rest assured that I fully plan to mock you and your invisible friend. I'll just won't deny your marriage license as well.
...by being forced to admit into their midst people that do not share their beliefs.
That is EXACTLY the excuse used by bigots to justify Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination. That's just a fancy way of saying "we don't want your kind here".
First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Second Clause forbids any law that interferes with religious practice.
Any law that impinges upon religious freedoms in ANY way is explicitly VOID upon it's face from it's beginnings. In fact, it shouldn't even get enforcement based on the decision of Marbury v. Madison, with the Supreme Court finding that, "It is also not entirely unworthy of observation that, in declaring what shall be the supreme law of the land, the Constitution itself is first mentioned, and not the laws of the United States generally, but those only which shall be made in pursuance of the Constitution, have that rank. Thus, the particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written Constitutions, that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void, and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument."
Tim Cook should, quite simply, shut his damn pie-hole unless he's going to get that amended.
This is why people should flatly NOT care about who says what- because idiots with celebrity make statements they flatly have no business making.
Don't business owners already have the right to refuse business to anyone for any reason? Is a law needed to use religion as the reason for this?
Do what you do best, and leave politics to a horse, it has a bigger head.
Is it hate disguised as religion? Let's see...
Leviticus 18 - "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination."
Leviticus 20 - "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them."
Ouch. Not so much hate, now is it? Let's see more, shall we?
Jude 1:7 - "the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah are stated to have been 'giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh,'"
Ouch. Again...not so much hate, now is it? Is there more?
Romans 1 - "For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet"
Ouch. Wow...that's even in the New Testament.
Sorry, you're full of shit and hatred yourself. I, as a Christian, love others as my brother, but I do hate the sin, do not condone it, and don't believe that those that claim to be actively practicing gays are anything but hypocrites. There's no hatred there...I don't accept their chosen lifestyle because it's explicitly called out as a sin in the Bible. You're off bashing Christians in your own remarks in the same manner you accuse them of. Projection much?
In the end, though, the laws are redundant. The Constitution EXPLICITLY calls out the anti-discrimination laws as they have been framed as being forbidden to all branches of Government in the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Want to change this? Get it amended. Best of luck, you'll NEED it.
to anyone. You have probably seen these signs in restaurants and other businesses. But in today's world, can a business owner really refuse to serve someone? The answer is it depends.
The Federal Civil Rights Act guarantees: "full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.". The Americans with Disabilities Act extends this to include people with disabilities. So currently, federal law does not extend these rights to sexual preference.
Some states, such as California, have extended the Civil rights act to include sexual preference. It passed something called the Unruh Civil Rights Act which makes it illegal to discriminate based on sexual preference and what it calls "unconventional dress". Other states have done similar things.
The point here is that currently it is a State's rights issue, not a Federal issue. So states are free to adopt the Federal Civil Rights Act as is or they can extend it to include other things, like California has done.
What Tim Cook and others are trying to do is have it become a Federal issue so that the Federal Civil Rights Act is amended to include sexual preference. Much like gay marriage proponents are attempting to do. Then states will be powerless to invoke their own individual standards.
We can debate whether or not it is the right thing to do but at the heart of it is a Federal vs. States rights struggle.
I can't believe how many people are can't wrap their heads around businesses being able to choose their own customers. Being a 'jerk' is a moral offense and should not a legal one on par with robbery or murder. People already are allowed to be jerks for a million other reasons, why is orientation so special? If the government needs to go after bakers not baking a cake for someone why not also jail and fines for adultery or cutting in line?
Tim Cook is an idiot. He obviously has no regard for the constitution and certainly no concept of the hierarchy of overlapping rights and responsibilities.
Is there any line that YOU would not cross? Is there any belief that you hold sacred? Is there anything that is not "against the law" that you would not do, for money? IF they said that they would take away EVERYTHING you own, your home, your business, because you refused to do this thing, would you say OK I'll do it. Could you have the courage of your convictions? Should someone be able to take away EVERYTING you own, because you REFUSED to do something? Whatever happened to the right to refuse a customer? They lose that sale, but should they lose EVERYTHING?
This is not for large publicly traded companies, this is for small mom and pop companies. This saves them from doing whatever unsavory thing some "customer" comes in and decides they want done. It lets them be honest that they do not want to do it, rather than "failing to meet contractual obligations" oopsy!
After all the lawsuits on poaching and how Apple and Google have decided to prevent poaching by restricting former employees opportunities even after they get laid off?
Now *that's* strange... but yep. I see *zero* difference between religious discrimination based on gender and racial discrimination... oh, except that the former means you need to pull down your pants so they can decide whether or not to discriminate against you.
And trolls, it doesn't matter what sex you really want to get laid by, deep down inside, you *still* won't get laid by anyone.
mark
I just finished Reza Aslan's "Jesus the Zealot," and much was said about the Roman occupation, and the Levite collaborators, even in the sanitized gospels that were whitewashed for a Roman audience.
"Give to Caesar that which is Caesar's, and give to God what is God's," is actually a direct challenge to throw the Romans out of Judea, a statement made within the Court of the Gentiles on the temple grounds. Tearing down and rebuilding the temple in three days, as a challenge to the high priest Caiaphas, also directly threatened the Roman order.
The Roman governors of Judea were alternately viciously efficient or incompetent, and a spirit of rebellion reached a crescendo after the crucifixion, when Judea was free from Roman rule for four years, then crushed by the armies of Vespasian and his son Titus, who utterly destroyed Jerusalem.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/03/27/19-states-that-have-religious-freedom-laws-like-indianas-that-no-one-is-boycotting/
Eleven other states have the equivalent law due to decisions in court cases.
Should salesforce.com be forced by law to do business in Indiana? Why is it permissible for salesforce.com to discriminate against Indiana based on the CEO's beliefs?
...after what happened to Mozilla CEO. I wholeheartedly support same sex marriage and plural marriage. I especially support alternative lifestyles entered by choice rather than because you were "born this way", because this country is about freedom of choice. I personally enjoy my choices and would hate to deny this to others. If an adult gay man wants to try conversion therapy to marry a woman he is not attracted to, it's no more our business than a woman who marries a rich guy she is not attracted to.
What I can not support is this notion that the only way you can be free is if nobody else is free. Brendan Eich was bullied out of his job just because he, as a private citizen, made a legal donation to a political campaign that most CA residents supported at the time. This is as reprehensible is a female CEO getting sacked because she had an abortion, and yet not a single gay rights organization came out against this. So despite donating money to oppose Prop 8, I will never again financially support these causes. I just can not be sure than my contributions will be used to promote equality rather than discrimination.
So I see how folks in Indiana would feel they need the law to make sure all personal beliefs are equally respected, not only most politically correct ones of the day. If I run a family IT shop and a bunch of Republicans show up wanting help with their campaign website, I don't want to serve them. How can I deny the same freedoms to a florist next door who doesn't want to participate in a same sex wedding?
Tim Cook and his ilk are fiercely against single people having the same rights to pension and tax benefits given to people who claim to be married. After all, these people are mutually masturbating, as opposed to single people who are using their own hand. Surely the constitution gives special rights to these mutual masturbators, as proclaimed by the supreme court.
Just let businesses identify themselves as equal opportunity service providers or something similar and direct your money to businesses who don't want to refuse you service?
This is a problem with a legit, simple free market solution that requires no government involvement at all. If somebody is providing a service that takes more than a couple of hours of time and they strongly object to having to do it...let them not do it. Take your business to somebody who doesn't object.
This is not complicated and the outrage is indicative of how much people have come to rely on government to solve problems it doesn't need to solve.
You're discriminating against Apple based on your beliefs. If discriminating based on one's beliefs is impermissible, you should be forced to buy iPhones. I hope you're prepared to pay a huge fine or go to jail or be forced out of your job or property by government (or government court-supported) bullying.
This is all just a distraction and pandering to a political base.
No it is not. It is an attempt to enshrine bigoted ideology into law against a group of people who have done them no harm. Just because it is pandering does not mean it will not do real harm.
No business that likes money and wants to continue making money will be discriminating against anyone.
BULLSHIT. Plenty of racist homophobes actually support this nonsense. This is legislation that specifically targets minority groups that by definition do not have the population to fight back directly. "Ohh, 1% of our customer base is angry with us, whatever will we do..."
Big corporations surely don't care who or what you sleep with in bed at night if you want to give them money.
Do you seriously think that the owners of Chick-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby wouldn't force their religion on others if given the chance? Companies are guided by people and people have biases. It's not even remotely difficult to find examples of companies discriminating against entire classes of people including women, blacks, hispanics, asians etc even when doing so is explicitly against the law. Ask women how that equal pay thing is going these day.
And if a small business decides to put their own religious beliefs in front of making money, then so be it if they go under.
If it were a fair world I would agree with you but reality frequently doesn't work that way.
A lot of other state have that in law have in *addition* ban on discrimination. Example : illinois they do indeed have a freedom fo religion act, but at the same time they have a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation. And as far as i can tell, when both conflict, the ban would take precedence.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Looks like you hurt someone's feelings.
Well said, though.
Just because I don't tolerate something does not mean I think that a law prohibiting that something is a good idea. On several occasions I have asked people (white people, and I'm white) to stop using the N word in my presence. But a law prohibiting that would be a violation of their (idiotic & racist) free speech and i would be against it.
To make it more plain. On average the country pays more to insurance companies that they are provided in medical services... otherwise the insurance companies would go out of business.
So, yes currently the government compels me to do business with a company that I don't want to
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Something didn't work one time, therefore nothing similar will ever work any time.
But they see no harm in forcing a religious person to choose between being faithful to God and making their living.
Exactly how is a religious person being harmed here? Harmed in a tangible way that we both can agree is real. A religious person claiming it is a "sin" for them to make a wedding cake for a gay couple is a mental block in their own head. This is nothing more than an attempt to justify a bigoted fear response. This sort of bogus argument is why we have separation of church and state in the first place. Economic transactions are the domain of the state and personal religious preferences should have NO bearing on them at all. Ever.
As far as I can tell, that prioritization is itself a religious judgment. It's saying that it's more wrong to refuse to blaspheme, than to blaspheme.
A religious person's imaginary rules for themselves are not and never should become my problem. If they want to live their life putting crazy imaginary restrictions on what they are ok with doing, that's their problem. They have NO right to make it my problem. I don't follow their religious law and I your argument is basically the same argument used to justify abominations like Jim Crow laws.
There is actually a really simple solution to all of this. The biggest complaint I have with all this is not that Gay people want to be legally joined. It is that the government has given special legal status and rights to a religious ceremony, marriage.
The best thing the country can do is pass a law that converts all marriages to civil unions, and grants all legal rights formally granted to marriages, to civil unions, and then remove those rights from marriage. Marriage goes back to being a religious ceremony with no legal status or rights like it should be.
Then religious people no longer have a complaint about marriage being redefined and gay people get all the legal rights they want. We can define Civil union however we want because religion is no longer involved.
Just my 2 cents
P.S. I am Christian
I see a lot of people throwing around words like "bigot" and "hate" on here. The thing is that the people displaying the most hate and bigotry appear to be those accusing people of believe of having those traits. Believe that something is wrong does not mean the person with that believe hates the person that commits that act.
I will start a new religion, where upon "dark" and "light" days will alternate. As a member, you will be obliged only to serve somebody of darker skin or lighter skin, depending on the day, all others will be turned away.
For example, If Tuesday is a "dark" day, you only are allowed to do business with or assist people with darker skin. The next day, you will only do business with those of a lighter skin shade.
Those without skin, or matching your own skin color are not to be dealt with, ever, as it is sinful.
Religious freedom!
Everyone discriminates. You choose physical / personality traits that you require in someone to date / marry / have sex with. You choose your hobbies, bands, etc. You say "I love McDonald's" or "I hate White Castle". EVERYONE DISCRIMINATES.
Not one of those forms of discrimination causes societal harm. Whom you chose to date does NOT cause the same problems as denying someone basic civil rights because they are a woman or a minority. There are some forms of discrimination that are plainly harmful to society so we protect classes of people against discrimination. No it is NOT ok to pass over someone for a job or pay them less because they have a vagina. No it is NOT ok to refuse service to a well behaved patron in a restaurant because of their skin color. Do not confuse basic consumer choices with civil rights.
Then with the Civil Rights movement, they decided that for blacks to have equal rights, business owners had to lose their rights (yeah, I don't get the logic either).
Say what now? You think it is ok for a business owner to refuse service on the basis of skin color? Business owners merely were required to actually follow the constitution (not to mention basic decency) which they could have been doing all along but didn't. "Don't get the logic"? Are you seriously that daft?
The only reason that people currently are opposed to the "religious freedom" law is because they don't like THAT religious view.
100% wrong. These "religious freedom" laws are simply sneaky attempts to enshrine and protect bigotry. Someone's religion should NEVER form a basis to refuse economic transactions because economic transactions are the domain of the state. That is a plain violation of the separation of church and state.
You're a special kind of stupid, aren't you? You didn't even understand what you wrote.
Past supporters of RFRA acts include Barack Obama (who voted for one as Illinois State Senator) and Bill Clinton (who signed one into law as President). So Tim Cook's position is not in the political mainstream and in fact it is even outside the liberal Democrat mainstream. The news here is Tim Cook inappropriately dragging Apple into a political war to endorse his own radical politics, not anything going on in Indiana.
Cooks' statements are also not based on any actual facts. See background on RFRA here.
Not long ago Apple stood for fanatical devotion to great design. Now it stands for tasteless bling and Tim Cook's political agenda. We all know the heartbreaking history of that company. It is made even sadder by Cook's failure to stay true to the vision.
from:
Apple: Insanely great design.
to:
Apple: Indiana is a bunch of Anti-homosexual Christian Bigots.
Tim Cook is not qualified to lead Apple. Not because he is gay (nothing wrong with that in my opinion) but because he is ruining the corporate image by putting his personal politics ahead of Apple's interests. If any other employee at Apple used the Apple name to endorse his own personal political views, that employee wold be fired. The same policy should apply to Cook.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
You can afford to pay any amount of medical expenses (for example, major heart surgery, serious trauma surgery etc) with cash on hand?
It's wager that you're something of an edge case.
Otherwise, I call bullshit on insurance "not providing anything [you] can't provide on your own".
Or do you mean your parents will pay?
Or are you just monumentally stupid enough to simply roll the dice daily by not having insurance and thinking you couldn't possibly get sick or be injured? and consider that a better position than actually having insurance (or access to universal healthcare if you live in any of the other developed nations on earth)?
We'll see how good an idea these bills are when Muslim employees in the DMV refuse to accept drivers license applications from women.
Extremist 'gay' activists attempt to con people into seeing the issue from a completely false perspective. NO State in the USA is giving companies the ability to deny their NEUTRAL services to 'gays'. No supermarket, for instance, can attempt to block 'gays' from entering and doing their shopping there. No, this is about 'gays' forcing a company to provide a BESPOKE GAY SERVICE.
Say you make 'erotic' cakes. These 'gay' activists want the ability to FORCE you to make (on request) a cake depicting male-to-male ANAL INTERCOURSE- if you refuse, they want you to be prosecuted under 'non-discrimination' Laws. I choose an EXTREME example her to clarify exactly what this gay lobby is arguing.
Take the example of a wedding photographer that chooses NOT to photograph a 'gay' wedding. A 'gay' wedding is NOT a wedding. It is a REASONABLE expression of the freedom of sexuality for adults, like a 'wedding' where a man marries his favourite horse- and YES they are equivalent, since homosexuality is NOT the master-race of 'deviant' sexuality- all forms of non-hereto-sexual behaviour are equally valid. If a gay has the 'right' to FORCE a wedding photographer to photograph their gay 'wedding', every other type of adult sexuality has the EQUAL right to force the photographer to photograph THEIR partnership ceremony as well.
This is NOT what sexual or religious freedom rights mean. YOU are free to be what you want to be. YOU are free to participate in society when your choices are NOT impacting that participation. But YOU do NOT have the right to demand from others services that EXPLICITLY serve your sexual or religious choices.
Does a fast food joint break religious discrimination laws when it REFUSES to offer non-pork or non-beef menu options. Funny, I don't recall any Yank making a fuss over this.
The extreme gay lobby exploits the inability of Betas to comprehend the flaws in their 'logic' and also the willingness of Betas to accept the idea that gays are the 'master-race' of Human sexual 'deviancy' (and I use that word in its scientific sense- as in deviates from the norm). It is like Judaism being the MASTER-RACE of non-Christian religions in the USA, and indeed the gay lobby acts identically to the zionist lobby.
Jews in the USA successfully argued in court that Muslims who sent money to Palestine SPECIFICALLY for the use of orphanages, could be charged and convicted of helping terrorism, because Palestinians, freed from having to pay for their own orphanages, could spend more money on the military means of attacking Israel. There are actually Muslims serving life sentences in US jails CONVICTED under this 'argument'. The gay argument that people should be FORCED by law into providing GAY SERVICES (which is NOT the same as serving gays) follows the same twisted logic.
PS gay lobby groups are now saying that children who find the idea of gay sex acts personally repulsive are 'HOMOPHOBIC' and should be targeted at school. Yes, if as a straight male you are disgusted by the idea of watching gay pornography, you are now a social 'criminal' under the twisted, evil perversion of the concept of sexual freedom of expression.
Here's a clue for you Beta dummies. I believe FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE is the greatest freedom, but at the same time I DESPISE all organised religions, and am equally disgusted when Christian-zionists (like the filth at HBO this last Sunday) have the bloody cheek of ganging up on Scientology. Believing in freedom of conscience does NOT mean giving any form of respect to anyone because of their religious choices. When the State chooses to give POWER to organised churches, this is NOT freedom of conscience at play. Likewise when the State chooses to give power to one type of sexual deviancy over all the others, something very wicked is happening.
Religious Freedom, or Freedom of Conscience, originally meant that the government wouldn't try to impose a particular brand of religion on the people.
The concept has been abused and mutilated until now it's interpreted as "My religion gives me freedom to trample all over your civil rights".
You have to read as far as the ninth amendment:
Other rights that are exclusively a matter of informed, personal and consensual choice, are obviously covered. Any law -- or private action -- that denies such rights is unconstitutional or simply wrongheaded.
Yes, I know there are many such laws and attitudes. WRT the laws, we had laws implementing slavery and denial of woman's right to vote (among many others), and we managed to figure out those were asshole positions to take. So there's considerable highly visible precedent for us correcting our course when ideas like yours manage to turn into law and acting out.
Hopefully, eventually we'll have legislators -- probably by accident -- that will be pro liberty instead of these lace-panty, pearl-clutching corporate shills we have now. As far as the attitudes go, we can't fix stupid. Yet. But genetics is coming right along, there's hope there, too.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Let's say you have a business called JelloMizer Marketing Group.
You are approached one day by a group that wants to hire you to improve their image and help them advocate their agenda. They will pay what you want.
But the thing is, the group is the Man Boy Love Association. And they want to lobby for reducing the age of consent to seven.
It's a legal group (as long as they don't act out on their proclivities) and they are exercising their legal rights until the Constitution. Also, as the Gay lobby has pointed out time and again, sexual orientation is genetic. These people can't help that they are attracted to 12 year old boys, it's who they are.
Do you take them on as customers? Or do you refuse because you believe their goals are vile and disgusting?
There's discrimination and then there's discrimination. It is virtually universally agreed that discrimination based on race, sex or color should be illegal. These are merely outward appearances which one cannot help, and we should not be solely defined on them.
However, each of us has other aspects that are based in behavior, and not appearance. We discriminate on the basis of behavior all the time. If someone walks into a staff meeting and announces, "I'm gay." it's applause all around. If someone walks into a staff meeting and announces, "I'm into spanking," not so much. Yet each announcement is nothing more than an indication of behavior which that person likes to engage in.
If I follow a set of morals which causes me to abhor certain behaviors, I should not be forced by law to be a party to those behaviors. I should not have to bake a cake that celbrates spanking. I should not have to bake a cake for Sea World if I think it is wrong to impound wild animals.
Discrimination based on appearance is wrong. Discrimination based on behavior is not so cut and dried. If gay people want to get married, fine, I don't care. Just don't force me to bake a cake for them.
So is Apple going to close its South Asia headquarters in Singapore, where homosexuality is a felony punishable by 2 years in prison?
Or do they not actually care about civil rights and are just trying to hook onto their customer base's current "cause of the week" in a cynical attempt to get good PR?
By looking at who owns the banks and big corps I can see a lot of Goys and Gentiles being denied services.
And you must vote republican as well right? The stupidity of you progressives amazes me sometimes.
Firsta than all, The STATE isn't made to shape the people's mind or believes, the same way that People Believes shouldnt shape the states laws. State purpose is to provide a common place where N different character individuals, etc can LIVE IN PEACE, to everybody, First instace o rule of an state is RESPECT TO INDIVIDUAL NATURAL RIGTHS ITS THE BASIS OF THE PEACE. On the other way, communities here pledges for the state to rule on things arent part of an secular state: Religious Matters. Everithing started when Married Catholics (just to name an religion) pledged for an "in men-laws marriage", contaminating the SECULAR STATE creating something that actually doesnt exist ( 'almost every religion states that an marriage in men-laws actually doesnt exist, since the marriage is an religious ceremony and being whife and husband its an faith condition') so those Married Catholics got what they want, a way to "marry" again, on which actually its an civilian contract, since almost no importatn religion consider valid ot true an "in men-laws marriage". So Cook (here representing what its "nick"-named the Gay Lobby), asked for somthing an true and perfect SECULAR STATE souldnt recognize: MARRIAGE, an true SECULAR state doesnt name an private contract with something extracted form an Cult or Religion, so If the Gay Lobby wants really all the advantages (legal, practical and social) the wrongly named "in men-laws marriage", they first must pledge to removal to all these Cohabitation Contract (what actually is) the nick "marriage", while retaining all the rigths and restrictions foreseen on such Cohabitation Contracts. The same way, Religous communities, should be considered an Club, not special groups, and in no way belonging or not to such community should allow any kind of discrimination from pro-gay, atheist, other religious group, and the state it self, and every individual should have warrant that its religuos practice will be respected while its kept inside the areas where such religion community acorded to practice it's belief. So an Gay dont have rigth to irrumpe an Catholic ceremony asking for gay marriage or chalenging the catholics with gay mods, its inaceptable. the same Catholics goups dont have right to irrumpe inside an Gay Pub, and without invite and preach "all the gays are doomed to hell" or things such. It's wrong on public space some law protect discrimination, the same is wrong individuals ask for laws protecting ofense to others. (this its true on both directions). So, no Gay Marriage un less its only an religious marriage and under some religion with this kind of marriage (non christian, jewish, islamist allows gay to marry and its very explicit), so gay are banned to ask for religious marriage on religions that don't allow it, no matter the *equity* question, marriage its an religious institution not an secular one. And so Cohabitation Contracts (incorrectly named Marriage) should be named Marriage (this is an religious ceremony), and also shoulnd be limited by religious belief and be just another contract, among Men an Women, two men, two women, many men and a woman, many woman and a men, whatever not restricted by religious belief but acordingly not named Marriage since an TRUE AND PERFECT SECULAR STATE DONT HAVE MARRIAGE AS NAME FOR WHAT ACTUALLY ITS AN COHABITATION CONTRACT. Everithing its possible, with mutual respect as basis, the problem here is that an cohabitatin contract isnt for some gays what actually interest for they (all the benefits of the in-men law's marriage) but to challenge the hetherosexual community with the "marriage" word; the same way Anti-Gay groups believe that banning certain rigths to Gays will drop the gay population or silence it, TWO WRONGS DONT MAKE AN RIGTH. Its my opinion.
A sing outside of a Texan court house: "Clerks who do a part of their job specified in the document written in Farsi at the private safe of the Mayor of Waco at the basement of an undisclosed villa will be shot."
Anyone can claim to Christian.
Jesus stated: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might, AND Love your neighbor as yourself"
If you claim to be a Christian, and can't love those who you believe to be are "lost" (or bake them a cake), you may as well claim to be a Super Sayijin.. as both claims are pretty farfetched.
Awesome!
Who has lobbied for this? What businesses, or churches, are pushing for this?
It's been repeatedly shown you are a bigot. By your own words.
Marriage is not defined by any specific religion, and not even by any specific class of religions (not by Christian, Muslim, Judaic, Abrahamic, etc.) It is a far older, and far broader concept.
There are a number of religions and religious institutions that perform homosexual Marriage, and others have for millennia. So nobody is redefining anything except you, or the religious zealots in your narrow and self-serving definition of religion.
Government is not forcing any religious institutions to perform anything. Individuals who have objections to the requirements of their government jobs (clerks, etc.) can find another job. (Libertarian enough for you?)
Business that offer public accommodation in the US can not discriminate against protected classes. Don't like it? Don't have a business that offers public accommodation. Again - this is freedom. You can have your club, private religious org, whatever. You can cater to your own members with any rules you want and they agree to.
What you cannot do is benefit from the public space, offer a service to the entire community, and use the general protections of government (like fire, safety inspections, police, roads. sidewalks) etc. and then discriminate against protected classes.
Don't like it? You have more freedoms. Move to North Korea or Somalia or some such other hellhole. Nobody is forcing you to live in the country that your fevered imagination thinks is oppressing your poor religion-addled mind.
Go read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah again.
The story is about how a group of men were coming to Lot's house to rape the visitors. As the host, it was Lot's job to protect them, and he even offered his daughter up for rape to protect his guests.
Now, find a story about two people of the same sex being in a committed loving relationship and show me where it is condemned.
Homosexuality in the Bible was always related to violence or the worship of other gods. There is not a reference to the type of homosexuality that exists today, so it is very hard to get a Biblical case, pro or con.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
If Tim Cook is so bloody interested in equality, he can give to the poor everything he is paid.
The US was founded on justice, equality before the law . All other forms of equality forced by law are a swindle; they are injustice.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
that may be sued for refusing to cater a Friday afternoon pig roast at a gay wedding.
Your sig is evil...
I agree on the rape angle, but it was implied that the men of the city enjoyed sodomy, and it was at least partially why the cities were destroyed. It is however very difficult to untangle, as it could be as much about dishonoring guests as it was about the attempt at forceful sodomy with the male angelic guests.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
A) I am not allowed to go to a religious service of my own choosing.
And so we all should be.
A) We force everyone to recognize everyone's relationships, including handing out benefits intended for helping people start families to just everyone.
B) We fix the laws so they're not so backwards, so that healthcare is single payer and a non-issue, that anyone can define who visits them in the hospital, that marriage benefits are changed to child-raising benefits as there's no reason to pay two people to have sex in the first place and that was already silly.
A) I can redefine living members of the genus homo sapiens to be 'sub-human' in some capacity and strip them of legal rights, following a long history of abuse, slavery, etc. where people we deemed sub-human due to a lack of mental capacity.
B) I am unable to legally kill.
A) I can be sued for praying in public if people are offended, even though nobody is actually forced to participate.
B) I have Freedom of Speech and people can criticize the prayers all they want, but not stop them.
A) I can be forced to violate my conscience and pay thousands of dollars for offending someone.
B) They can go to any of the dozens of other cake shops and put me out of business.
A) Another religious group has been declared the official faith of my country.
Namely, atheism.
A) Any non-public schools are kept by policy out of the hands of those who are not rich, with every attempt at letting people out being cut off, allegedly for fear that our already terrible public schools could get even worse.
B) We let people pick whatever school they like, so long as it meets reasonable educational standards.
Corporate cult vs religious cult.
It's like watching the last two US presidents in a steel cage match, and then being asked which one you hope will win when it doesn't matter as long as one of them gets the shit beat out of them.
These fundamentalist Christians are dirty perverts. They spend way too much time thinking about what other people are doing in the privacy of their own homes, and then for some reason they want to get involved by going into those bedrooms and playing dominator/dominatrix and telling people what to do while they're having sex.
Any non govt. non monopoly business should be allowed to NOT do business with anyone they wish.
For any reason. Including race, religion or orientation.
Forcing them is the worse of two evils.
...isn't this the guy whose products are built by labor force that is for all intents and purposes, slaves?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I think we should not be forced to accept gays.. what about my rights ? If I own a family business I don't want my kids or customers exposed to gays.
We should have institutionalized gays in an insane asylum. It's a mental disorder.
No more iPhones from me...
... can now refuse to help with windows or apple related issues. Gnuff said.
Surely the fair thing to do is to let every other bigoted group ban who they want.
If an individual has a religious objection to doing something... who is anyone to say they have to do that thing?
Leave people alone.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It is supposedly written in crude Greek by a student of Paul.
Mark 11:27 clearly has Jesus in the temple with a crowd of his followers, delivering this statement in 12:13, in full view of the centurions of the Antonia fortress which the Romans had physically attached to the temple walls. In order to gain access to the Court of the Gentiles, Jesus would have walked beneath the Roman eagles that had been affixed to the entrances of the temple by Herod (crowned king of Judea by Rome).
The priestly vestments and tools were kept in the Antonia fortress, and given to the high priest only when required.
Rome owned Jerusalem and greater Judea, and expressed no hesitation in demonstrating this fact.
Also, bear in mind that Nazereth was a small town near the larger city of Sepphoris, where Jesus likely worked as a carpenter. Sepphoris was burned to the ground by the Romans in an earlier revolt.
It is highly unlikely that Jesus was ambivalent to the Roman occupation of Judea.
In funny a way it's a good thing the society has reached a point where people have completely, absolutely, totally forgotten what religious freedom fundamentally means and why it's important.
Three or four hundred years ago, expressing your personal religious belief in the privacy of your own home could lead to soldiers dragging you off to prison and all of your wealth being confiscated by the state.
Religious freedom is the absence of that happening.
If a person were to wear KKK clothing into a black-owned business, does that person have the right to demand service? Are we really going to force that business owner?
Finland's official Pravda^W^Wleading newspaper had an article on this particularly American issue. The main thesis is that you guys have a lot of freedom to offend and beat up each other, because any government intervention would go against the natural freedom of free men to do unto each other as they like. Of course, the follow-up is reduced freedom for individuals in lots of ways. You guys have more freedom than us in certain ways, but as a result you have less freedom in some other ways. It's hard to say which way is right, but it sure sounds a lot like BSD vs. GNU.
Personally, I'm in for more freedom in some areas. Finland officially switched from the Eastern Bloc into the EU 20 years ago, but I'm yet to see the full effects.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Anti-discrimination laws for private people/businesses are meaningless, feel-good pablum. They do nothing. You can't stop people from being aholes, and it's wrong to try to legislate them away from being aholes. Note that this does not of course include violence, fraud, etc...
Know what it's pointless? All you have to do to not serve gays (or any other group you don't like) is hurl abuse at them as soon as they come in the door.
"Sure, you dirty #!@#$ I'll bake your wedding cake for you $%!@suckers. Oh, you want me to shoot pictures of you little $#!@'s? Well, OK, but I'll be hurling abuse at them too."
Nothing one of you liberals can do about that, either. I agree discriminating against gays is both idiotic and bad for business, but you can't stop people. Sure, you can make them technically offer the service or product, but that's just a feel-good law that violates a basic human right to be an asshole.
While I am surely against discrimination, there is a place for law, and a place to let the market handle itself. We already have laws to address discrimination, so the law being discussed is something else. For example if you refuse to sell a tire from your shelf to "one of those" you will be sued, and rightfully so. Similarly, if you refuse to hire "one of those" or fire a person because they are "one of those" you will be sued, and again rightfully so. These are good laws, and should remain on the books. (Pardon the generalization, "one of those" was shorter than the long list of potential discrimination targets, no offense was intended.)
Considering that we already have laws, and the new law is not overruling those, we should ask what the new law was supposed to cover (go ahead and read the short history on this, I have). It is to cover a service industry having the right to refuse specific customized services and was exactly the result of a gay couple suing a bakery that refused to customize a cake they way the couple wanted. Note that this is not some off the shelf item that the baker refused to sell, it was not a job applicant that was refused, it was a specific modification that someone wanted that was refused.
If you answer no to the question in my subject, then why do you care about a law forcing a service to make you something the way you want it? Is this not a place for normal marketing pressure to make the correction if and where necessary? If a bakery refuses to make something you want, don't shop at that bakery? A different bakery willing to do your custom work will be happy to make the money. Good service distinguished from bad is exactly the thing that makes successes and failures in the "Services industry". If there are no other bakeries worth a damn in your area, start your own and cash in! That is what the "American Spirit" is all about.
I think the law as written was vague enough to be poor. Better written, it would have still resulted in some protest but not nearly as justified.
I see this in line with the huge amount funding and campaigns that went into making all bars and restaurants "no smoking". No law ever forced any of those businesses to support smokers, and a savvy entrepreneur could have made a mint on "no smoking" clubs and restaurants. Not that smoking is good (though it's legal), but the legislation forcing a service to behave a certain way breaks normal competition. The market can't dictate success, the Government does. It is too easy for this type of law to end up on a slippery slope.
Whether or not you believe it was "stupid" there are additional costs associated with customizing services, some are potentially long term. If the bakery was in a highly religious area and accepted the job of customizing the cake how much business would they lose? If they are in an area with a high population of LGBT, how much would they gain? Those are factors a service business needs to weigh. Even if in someone's opinion it's stupid not to do the extra, how many people in the world have a religion? I'll give you a hint, the majority does. Again, this is not refusing to sell an off the shelf product which resulted in a successful lawsuit. It was the refusal to customize a product that resulted in the successful lawsuit.
To make some comparative analogies: Should the Jewish or Muslim person be able sue the butcher for having pork on it's shelf, or should the market dictate that a butcher shop in a predominantly Jewish or Muslim area not carry pork? How about the atheist that lives in the same neighborhood, can they sue? Can the gay male sue the topless bar for not having male performers? Can the lesbian woman sue Chip&Dales for not having female performers? This is the precedent that was set with the successful bakery suit, unfortunately. We can't put that Jeanie back in the bottle, so I believe additional legislation is surely needed.
As I indirectly stated numerous times, the "Services Industry" is not the same as other businesses. The commodity is the personalization, not just fixed object cost. Society generates the normals with financial support for good choices, and gets rid of bad the same way.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
A kid deserves a mother & father.
Sodomy is simply sexual contact without the aim of procreation. Did the Bible specifically talk about men taking it up the wazoo?
For the lazy, there's only THREE Shakers left in the world, so maybe everyone will get the sarcasm.
We have to start from the premise that said individual may well not be able to afford these options.
Then, we pay for the same reason that we as group pay for other things that benefit society over the long term, like roads, fire departments, public education, defense, sewers, sidewalks, dikes, rain gutters. We know certain needs are going to come up, and/or certain events will actually happen, so we prepare for them in some way that optimizes the outcome.
Unwanted children are very often a serious burden both on society at large, and often upon the parents, and often even to themselves. The workforce is diminished and damaged, and people grow up under conditions that start out with a fairly strong negative impetus.
We benefit directly by stronger parent-child relations; by prepared parents as opposed to "oh crap, I/we didn't plan on THIS!" parents; By better educated and happier citizens.
It's the future we're investing in. That's one of the best things society can do.
Lastly, the evaluation should, at least in my estimation, be based upon this criteria:
Which is worse? Unwanted children, loss of productivity, social turmoil and misery, or a very reasonable levy upon the citizens in general?
To me, if that is the question (and I think it is), the answer is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I mean who cares. You people put too much emphasis on government acknowledgment. People will ultimately do what they want to do regardless, whether it's discriminatory or not.
This is just yet another galvanizing bi partisan blow up of pure political crap.
Moving on...
religious freedom is one thing: a poor excuse for behaving badly.
...that the slaughter of Sepphoris would have no impact whatsoever on the childhood of Yeshua? That the wounded refugees sheltering in Nazereth would have no impact on him? That childhood memories of a Roman atrocity would have no lasting effect? That the PTSD his family likely suffered made no difference whatsoever?
You also mistake guile in talk of the occupation for peaceful intent - direct threats against the Romans was suicide. Did not Jesus say to sell your cloak and buy a sword? That he came to set 3 against 2, and 2 of 3, father against son, and mother daughter?
I'm not buying it. Reread all you like.
I don't GIVE A FLYING FUCK what Tim Cook says, thinks, farts or shits.
How the fuck does this even make Slashdot?
"Religious Freedom" means that you can believe as you wish free of government control or mandate, not that you can force others to believe what you believe or others can be forced to act in ways contrary to their beliefs, but consistent with yours.
The Bible is full of stories of real-world penalties that are to be paid for following your beliefs, including death. These modern believers want their outward expression of their beliefs to be free of any real-world consequences from people who do not share those beliefs. That's not how any of this works.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
your right, what's the harm in letting people discriminate based on their prejudices, it's not like so many people would do it that someone is actually hurt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zbul7EnI3w
I don't understand why these laws are even being considered. In my state stores are allowed to post a sign at the register which states that they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. I realize that this is usually reserved for folks who enter diners without shirts and shoes. But by bringing religion into the mix clearly (in my opinion) makes such laws unconstitutional (the whole Separation of church and state thing).
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...
What happens when someplace refuses service to a federally protected minority? I'm counting the days till someone sues in FEDERAL court for millions and names the state as a willing accomplice. I don't see how the state would stand a chance in federal court.
You're free to exercise your religion, you're just not free to acquire a business license and operate under any hocus pocus framework you want.
But it seems that there is no federal law, as written, that prohibits discrimination of customers are a business based on sexual orientation. Not even federal employment laws seem to protect LGBT, except for federal employees
But the Supreme Court can establish a precedent that the existing federal laws that protect the enumerated classes of race, national origin, religion, sex, age, and disability also cover classes not enumerated (what criteria?). Doing so would then prevent states from operating pro-religion/anti-LGBT laws until the federal laws are modified to overturn the precedent by specifically excluding LGBT. It's not so unusual, Reed v. Reed (1971) extended the reach of this clause, and Romer v. Evans (1996) is a case that is strikingly similar to the current issue.
But until that happens, the issuing of business licenses is controlled at the State and County level and remains at their discretion as long as the federal guidelines are follow with regard to the enumerated protected classes. So if your State Assembly and Governor are into the same hocus pocus as you, you can all hold hands and triumphantly expel all the gays from your community. (no, not really going to play out that way. but that's what the end goal appears to be)
(that's how this arm-chair non-lawyer sees it)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The reason why these laws have been coming down is because people are concerned, rightly, that they will be compelled to engage in forced expression in favor of something that they find morally wrong. Whether you believe it is morally wrong is besides the point - no one should be compelled to engage in any form of expressive activity in favor of something they find morally repugnant. The first amendment enshrines our freedom of speech and the 13th states that no form of involuntary servitude is to be permitted in the United States - and trust me, if you're forced to make the choice between (1) being fined into eternal indebtedness to the state (as these fines cannot be discharged in bankruptcy) or having your livelihood cut off or (2) engaging in conduct you find wrong: it's involuntary. Why are people concerned about this? Bakers have been put out of business because they refused to use their artistic talents (which express themselves) to make wedding cakes for homosexual unions. At least one photographer was handed down ruinous fines for refusing to photograph a homosexual wedding. A florist was shut down for refusing to make a floral arrangement for a homosexual wedding. Each of these people believe that their actions would be tantamount to approving the homosexual wedding and such actions would be in violation of their deeply held religious belief (see, i.e. Romans 1:32 - the conduct itself is condemned, but even those who approve of such conduct are condemned). Frankly, I don't think that the gays who asked for these services did so in good faith - they did it to cause problems for those people because they loathe them. They want to drive religious expression completely from the public square and keep it confined to a two hour slot on Sunday (or Saturday as the case may be).
If you are in business, then your constitutional rights go out the window???
So..... it was RIGHT then in the 1950's for blacks in some places to be banned from owning businesses? After all, the culture in those places at the time disapproved of such business owners, so since they were out of step with the clear will of the people they apparently by modern left-wing theory had no right to be in business (at least until they caved-in and became white...)
Thie modern leftist garbage that people do not have the CLEARLY WRITTEN CONSTITUTIONAL religious freedoms, because they confligt with some sexual deviants whose supposed superior protections are not even IN the constitution puts EVERYBODY's constitutional rights at risk, all on the altar of the current fad of puclicly celebrating various sexual proclivities.
The nation was FOUNDED by largely protestant Christians and its laws are based on their ideology but it was not , at its founding nor at any time since a "Christian Theocracy"
No new effort to slightly retard the de-Chrisitianizing of the nation by the atheists and gays of the hard-left will convet the nation into a "Christian Theocracy"... at best these laws will slightly delay the rot of the civilization.
"Nobody is saying you have to celebrate same-sex marriage" is a blatant lie.
Photographers have been sued for not photographing gay weddings (i.e. being active participants in something they believe is deeply sinful), bakers have been sued for not baking custom wedding cakes for (and specifically decorated to celebrate) gay marriages, ranch owners have been sued for not renting their property for use in gay marriage ceremonies and allowing it to be decorated for the gay marriage and photographed decorated and used that way, etc
Consider:
"Amendment I"
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
You will note that there is no "except when your religion offends a bunch of sexual deviants", or "except when you open a business" in there.
It's currently a BIG CAUSE on the left to wipe-out all issues of morality in the legal code, so it's no surprise that you guys are eager to ignore the plain text of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights if it offends any group with a focus of what's between their legs.... BUT the precedents you set when you wage such a "social justice war" will be far-reaching and you're not gonna like the eventual effects. If government can drive a person out of business because that person's beliefs are unpopular with a core constituent of a politician NO MATTER WHAT the Constitution says, then it can do that to ANYBODY. Any future politician will be free to strip all environmentalists or gays or you-name-it of THEIR rights NO MATTER WHAT the Constitution actually says. Obama promised that he would "fundamentally transform" the United States, and it appear he was right - in his aftermath and aided by his midless supporters nobody in the US has any actual fixed and guaranteed rights.
If I'm a radical Muslim, would such a law allow me to wage Jihad and behead the infidels, only because my religion forces me to do that and I'm permitted to fulfill my religious obligations? It sounds like Texas and the whole Bible Belt are the place where Al-Qaeda should move their HQ, their sacred haven, land of religious freedom.
No company wants to hire a muslim.
So an employer can either cite a law that allows the company to do this, when a muslim applies for a job, or, as was always the case before these laws, use vague arguments such as 'we have found an other candidate that better fits in the existing team' or 'an other candidate better fits the current company culture.'
So effectively, nothing changes, just the way it is motivated changes.
Freedom is discriminatory? Really? So what Tim Cook can offer in contrary to that? Because forbidding the religion is itself a discrimination. Religion slavery instead?.. There is a saying: "Ask an idiot bow to God and he will destroy his forehead".
... Turns out that it's the same groups that continually try and pass their discrimination laws against law-abiding gun owners. Hurts, don't it?
At least he was just a grasping, greedy meglomanical fascist, and I didn't need to hear public proclamations of his sexual orientation or just how much he was going to pooch his family in his will when he kicks off. Now this.
Honestly, you idiot, I don't care about any of your thoughts on any of these topics. You seems to think that because you're the world's most publicly rich gay man, that gives you cred. Pfft.
I am required by the government, over penalty of a large fine to do business with corrupt insurance companies. I MUST purchase their product, that provides me nothing that I can't provide on my own. I like how now we equate having insurance with having access to health care. Currently I pay about 10,000 dollars a year for insurance that provides me about 5000 dollars in services a year. What could I do with that additional 5,000 dollars a year for the next 10-15 years that I am running a surplus to create a saving account that I can pay for services when I am older and running a deficit.
To make it more plain. On average the country pays more to insurance companies that they are provided in medical services... otherwise the insurance companies would go out of business.
So, yes currently the government compels me to do business with a company that I don't want to
Yes, and I have to pay car and buildings insurance and get nothing back at all each year! Those evil insurance companies are just pocketing my money and buying themselves yachts.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Pilate sent scores of insurgents to Golgatha every day. Tiberius recalled him to Rome for sending a phalanx to butcher several thousand Jews in a riot. A personal interview was thus extremely unlikely, and the "hand washing" just preposterous.
Try a basic test - who met Jesus first after the resurrection? Each gospel has a different answer. Unless you are extremely versed at doublethink, some of them have to be wrong.
But, boy howdy he is STILL doing business in Saudi Arabia where they EXECUTE gays and behead innocent victims of rape.
You have to love the principles of the Left.
Discrimination is not inherently bad. It is the application that is bad.
We don't have a 'right' to drive a car, it is a privilege. It is discriminatory against the people that want to drive a car that don't want to abide by other definition of 'civil conduct'. It is also discriminatory to allow ANYONE to get away with anything that EVERYONE is allowed (but not required) to do.
Get over it. Life isn't 'fair'.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
You call the complete destruction of Jerusalem unrest?
And I imagine that Sepphoris also was not destroyed in 4BC by the Roman legions that were not in Judea?
And Herod Agrippa was a kind and just ruler, of whom Claudius remarked "I'd rather be his dog than his son?"
what about rights for nudists to eat in public? Where does it end?
As a Christian I can understand why people would want such protections from having their small business's being shutdown because they don't want to participate in a gay wedding or activity. The law is the same as the Federal law that was signed by Bill Clinton and has been adopted by 26 other states. Even the State of CT one of the largest Gay protectorates in the US has that same law on the books. That being said I would say as a Christian I would not hesitate providing services to gay people at gay events. Money is money even if I don't agree with their activities. St. Paul says to Christians, to eat meat that was previously sacrifced to Roman gods because the food ultimately comes from God. I look at work contracts that come from the Gay community in the same way. It's work that is comming from God and it's resources being provided ultimately from God. Jesus would never turn away people for just being gay. He welcomed every shunned person in the first century, Women, Prostitutes, Publicans, tax collectors and others. I don't see why he would not welcome gay people either. I think American Christians need to be more like Christ and less like their favorite TV preachers. Sorry folks for taking up too many words or being snarky here like many others.
Paul E. Bahre
God's word is clear about homosexual acts that it is a detestable thing.
(Leviticus 20:13) “‘If a man lies down with a male the same as one lies down with a woman, both of them have done a detestable thing. They should be put to death without fail. Their own blood is upon them. NWT
Leviticus 20:13King James Version (KJV)
13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
The word lie does not mean telling untruths...it means laying down with. Ya'll better pay attention. God is gonna have them all executed at Armegeddon soon enough anyhow. I suggest you get out from among them. Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed because of homosexual activity.
(Jude 7) In the same manner, Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them also gave themselves over to gross sexual immorality and pursued unnatural fleshly desires; they are placed before us as a warning example by undergoing the judicial punishment of everlasting fire.
You have been warned.
... But not for Thee Tim Cook is merely echoing the ignorance and bigotry of the radical left. He cannot fathom a situation where citizens should be protected from government action that violates their religious beliefs. The stance taken by Tim Cook is nothing less than Anti-Christian Bigotry http://bit.ly/anti-christian-b... There is a very big difference between discriminating against someone based on who they are as opposed to actions they are taking. RFRA laws simply allow my company to defend itself against the government when it wants to force us to participate in actions that violate the religious beliefs of the company. Those on the radical left are not content with just leaving no room for dissent - they also want hearty approval (from their opponents!) for actions the opponent finds offensive. "To require a wedding vendor to service a same-sex wedding is not eliminating discrimination against the gay couple. It’s coercing the wedding vendor. Think of an alternative situation where a gay baker is required [forced] to bake dessert cakes for a pro-marriage [anti- same-sex marriage] rally sponsored by a conservative group. Surely we should acknowledge that a person should not be required to provide a good or service for an event premised on views that the baker finds objectionable. Do you really want to live in a country where supposedly free businesses are required to use their goods and services against their will?" http://bit.ly/indiana-rfra-eig...
"What these religious-freedom laws say is that government can require people to violate their religious beliefs only when it is pursuing a compelling interest, and must do so in the least intrusive manner possible." http://bit.ly/tim-cook-do-your...
"... what the Indiana and other bills actually do is help manage an important policy dilemma. As a society, do we value gay rights? Increasingly the answer is yes. Do we value religious freedom and practice? Historically the answer is yes. We value both, but they do not always live easily together. What this bill does is help courts manage the dilemma—while protecting against discrimination, also protecting religious rights where the state has no compelling interest in violating them or where alternative policies less restrictive to religious rights should be pursued." http://bit.ly/indiana-sanity
Usually it's the Democratic Party attempting to divide and conquer We the People -- anything to hand-wave away from the 4,000,000 words of IRS Tax Code, the flood of red ink, and the lack of efficacy checks throughout the Presidential cabinets.
In this case, the Republicans and their extreme Christian lobby have divided We the People with a very foolish division -- Religious vs. Non-Religious. This is a violation of secular ideals, to say the least.
Rather than Pence claiming that it's okay "because Clinton did it" the GOTP should modify the wording to put it more in line with the Right to Remain silent and/or Conscientious Objection -- for example "Freedom of Conscious" act. This would have protected both secular and religious people from performing acts for hire that they find personally appalling.
Full Disclosure : I am a profound Tea Party Libertarian who despises the Modern Democratic Party and believes that a three step process exists to restore the Constitution : 1) Drop the IRS Tax Code from 4,000,000 words to a small set of entities and formulas; 2) Abolish the Continuing Resolution (force the Legislature to Appropriate); 3) Privatize all of the Executive Cabinets and use a small shim of highly trained Validation and Verification specialists to perform contract monitoring. I believe in the restoration of Freedoms and Liberties for all adults, regardless.
George Costanza: [Soup Nazi gives him a look] Medium turkey chili.
[instantly moves to the cashier]
Jerry Seinfeld: Medium crab bisque.
George Costanza: [looks in his bag and notices no bread in it] I didn't get any bread.
Jerry Seinfeld: Just forget it. Let it go.
George Costanza: Um, excuse me, I - I think you forgot my bread.
Soup Nazi: Bread, $2 extra.
George Costanza: $2? But everyone in front of me got free bread.
Soup Nazi: You want bread?
George Costanza: Yes, please.
Soup Nazi: $3!
George Costanza: What?
Soup Nazi: NO SOUP FOR YOU!
Soup Nazi: What is this? You're kissing in my line? NOBODY KISSES IN MY LINE!
Sheila: I can kiss anywhere I want to.
Soup Nazi: You just cost yourself a soup!
Elaine Benes: Um... you know what? Has anyone ever told you you look exactly like Al Pacino? You know, "Scent Of A Woman." Who-ah! Who-ah!
Soup Nazi: Very good. Very good.
Elaine Benes: Well, I...
Soup Nazi: You know something?
Elaine Benes: Hmmm?
Soup Nazi: NO SOUP FOR YOU!
Elaine Benes: What?
Soup Nazi: COME BACK ONE YEAR! NEXT!
how would you feel about being forced to make a swastika cake, or cater/photograph (be present for) an event like an anti-gay rally? retards
I've not been keeping up, but I'm pretty sure Indiana still has a better track record on human rights than China.
And that's even if you buy the bizarre notion that bakers and photographers and such are "common carriers" who have to accept anyone who meanders up to their doors as a customer.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Religions are ~2000 years old;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Humans are ~200,000 years old;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Religion was born when the first con man met the first fool;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Casteism
There were several miracle workers in Judea at the time of Yeshua, some who could even raise the dead by contemporary accounts. The main difference is that Yeshua performed his miracles without monetary charge. If this aspect is similar, and rebellion was a common sentiment (i.e. Sepphoris), then we can assume that Yeshua was familiar with the issues, even if he did not share the opinions of all of them.
After the crucifixion, Paul changed Yeshua radically, abandoning Mosaic law and calling himself the "first apostle." James the Just, the head of the whole church, recalled Paul to Jerusalem twice, and censured him for what would amount to heresy. James then dispatched emissaries to all of Paul's congregations to correct the "flawed" teaching, which was largely successful. There is even a story in the memoirs of Clement (Peter's successor) that Paul threw James down a flight of stairs in a rage on his second return.
Paul's teachings would have been discarded, if James had not been murdered, and Jerusalem destroyed. As it was, Paul's writings were the only existing documents after Jerusalem's fall, and all the later gospels included strong influence from his letters.
The rebellious attitude of Yeshua towards the Romans would not serve a new Roman religion, so it was removed, for practical reasons.
I would be interested in Tim Cook's opinion on Iran's gay rights being that they have a store in Tehran and all. I'll wait......