In alone, laws with similar language were passed in five states—Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Dakota and North Carolina—and introduced as bills in dozens more. In October, U. Taylor says that there are obvious parallels between long-ago religious arguments against interracial marriage and current religious arguments against the marriages of same-sex couples. Although the Supreme Court refused to hear Barber v. Follow these bills at lambdalegal.
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Skip to main content. Search form Search. But Connecticut denies the exemption if the organization receives state funding, and Minnesota if it performs secular business activities. Four states allow religious employers to refuse insurance to LGBT spouses. Three extend this to married-couple housing. Faith-based adoption agencies particularly illustrate the scope of disagreement about religious-organization exemptions.
Catholic Charities, a large Roman Catholic social services agency, ended adoption services in Massachusetts after state law required all adoption agencies to place children with same-sex couples. In contrast, Connecticut, Maryland, and Minnesota allow non-publicly funded religious adoption agencies to deny same-sex placements, and Rhode Island allows heterosexual-only placement even with public funding.
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These conflicting state laws reflect a substantive disagreement whether it is more important to keep religious organizations in the adoption business, no matter their standards, or to ensure that all adoption providers treat heterosexual and LGBT families equally. While the states debated religious-organization exemptions, a group of prominent law professors lobbied them to adopt a Model Conscience Protection Act with the following broad range of exemptions for all types of religious associations:. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no religious corporation, association, educational institution, society, charity, or fraternal organization, and no individual employed by any of the foregoing organizations, while acting in the scope of that employment, shall be required to.
No refusal to provide services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges protected by this section shall. Wilson, Two sections of this proposal were especially far-reaching. The Model Conscience Protection Act also recommended broad commercial exemptions for businesses, as the following section explains.
Marriage Rights and Religious Exemptions in the United States
Commercial exemptions pose a serious threat to LGBT marriage equality because they reach into multiple aspects of life. Commercial vendors provide cakes, dresses, flowers, food, photographs, venues, and many more items and services to LGBT couples. In two early commercial-exemption court cases, the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that a photographer who refused to take pictures at a same-sex commitment ceremony enjoyed no free speech or free exercise rights to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, Elane, , and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission held that bakery owners possessed no free exercise or free speech rights to refuse wedding cakes to same-sex couples.
Craig, Statutory exemptions could terminate similar lawsuits in the District of Columbia and twenty-one states that outlaw sexual orientation discrimination. A to provide goods or services that assist or promote the solemnization or celebration of any marriage, or provide counseling or other services that directly facilitate the perpetuation of any marriage; or.
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B to provide benefits to any spouse of an employee; or. C to provide housing to any married couple if providing such goods, services, benefits, or housing would cause such individuals or sole proprietors, or owners of such small businesses, to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs. Yet these proposals, just like religious-organization exemptions, apply to same-sex couples throughout their lives, transforming marriage into an excuse to avoid the sexual orientation discrimination laws.
Although many Americans had religious objections to interracial marriage in the s, and although some still do today, federal and state antidiscrimination laws have never included exemptions that would allow business owners to deny services based on those beliefs. Likewise, although the New Testament quotes Jesus explicitly condemning divorce and remarriage as adultery, and although such remarriages violate the current teachings of the largest Christian denomination in America, state laws prohibiting discrimination based on marital status do not contain exemptions allowing commercial businesses to refuse to facilitate the remarriages of divorced people.
Post- Obergefell , only Louisiana has exempted for-profit businesses from serving customers through a specific statutory marriage exemption. Instead, several states have considered using their general religious freedom statutes so-called RFRAs to accomplish the same goal, as the next section explains.
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In , the Supreme Court confirmed that the Free Exercise Clause does not exempt citizens from obeying neutral laws of general applicability. Employment, In response, a large coalition of religious groups lobbied Congress for a broad exemption statute and received the Religious Freedom Restoration Act RFRA , which authorizes religious believers to challenge all neutral laws of general applicability. Hamilton, But legislation can be redrafted.
Vociferous debates about RFRA exemptions to the antidiscrimination laws can be expected to continue indefinitely as same-sex marriage opponents adjust to Obergefell. Religious nonprofit organizations already enjoy two less controversial exemptions than RFRAs. The Supreme Court held in Hosanna-Tabor v.
EEOC that the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment prohibit courts from adjudicating some antidiscrimination lawsuits by ministers against their employers.
Hosanna, Many religious institutions assert the ministerial exception as a defense to sexual orientation discrimination lawsuits after firing their married LGBT employees. Fontbonne Academy, a Massachusetts Catholic school for girls, unsuccessfully pleaded that its new food services director, Matthew Barrett, was a minister when it withdrew his job offer after Barrett listed his male spouse as an emergency contact.
Barrett, Other plaintiffs, though, especially schoolteachers, have been less successful in overcoming the ministerial defense. The ministerial exception is a potent weapon for employers.
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Many religious institutions want to fire LGBT employees, whose sexual orientation is more obvious now that they enjoy the constitutional right to marry. Three years post- Hosanna-Tabor , state and federal courts have only just begun to identify the contours of who qualifies as a minister. Thus ministerial employees may find their constitutional right to marry overridden by the First Amendment while their employers discriminate with tax-exempt status. Yet post- Obergefell , the IRS commissioner quickly repudiated the idea that the federal government would amend the tax code to deny exemptions to institutions that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
During the s, the IRS denied tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies. Bob Jones did not admit students who were interracially married or dating or who espoused such relationships. Bob Jones, The recent focus on LGBT marriage has confounded the general laws of marriage. Such prospects undermine the long-term legality and practicality of marriage exemptions, as the next section argues. Marriage equality or religious liberty? Equal protection or free exercise?
Lawyers disagree about which constitutional values should govern the marriage exemption debate. Stern, Neutrality should resolve the equality versus liberty debate. Unfortunately, it has not. Both equal protection and free exercise jurisprudence require laws to be neutral, that is, not targeted with animus at any individual or group. Obergefell, ; Employment, Current same-sex-marriage-inclusive laws are neutral under both equal protection and free exercise principles.
Yet the expansion of the statutory-exemption regime—with its patchwork of arbitrary exemptions—threatens the neutral constitutional order. Antidiscrimination laws falter if significant portions of the U. Both Loving and Obergefell rejected Christianity-based marriage laws that accepted racial separation and heterosexual normativity as the ideal for every marriage.
Yet religious exemptions threaten to re-establish religious marriage law by undermining the neutral marriage law that governs everyone equally. Only time will tell if general acceptance of neutral marriage laws will eventually cause citizens to rethink the exemption regime and embrace the idea that only neutral laws that apply to everyone can protect equality and liberty. Bernstein v. PN34XB N. Safety Dec.
Case, Mary Anne.
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