This is bigotry, not religious liberty

As you probably know, Arkansas has been making the national news for the work of its legislature, and not in a good way. The passage of SB 202, with the misleading title of “Intrastate Commerce Improvement Act” was intended to stop local anti-discrimination laws from being passed if they went further to protect people from discrimination than state-level laws. (Read: If they protected LGBTQ folks.) Our governor chose to allow it to become law without his signature.

Now we have a companion bill, HB 1228, presented as a “Conscience Protection Act”, which would allow a person “to act or refuse to act” based on “sincerely held religious beliefs”. The bill is designed to legalize discrimination such as refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. It allows the claim to “sincerely held religious beliefs, whether or not the exercise is compulsory or central to a larger system of religious belief”. In other words, your church or synagogue or mosque or scriptures don’t have to teach the kind of discrimination you want to practice to “protect” your action under this law. You get to act or refuse to act “without limitation”. (Read the bill here. It’s only four pages long. It doesn’t take much space to express nonsense.)

This bill simply provides legal protection for bigotry. Similar attempts at perpetuating injustice are happening around the country.

From a religious perspective, I find it quite bizarre. You can’t engage in business transactions with sinners? I don’t know about your religion, but mine teaches that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God“. That pretty much eliminates the customer/client pool, if all sinners are to be avoided when doing “Christian” business.

Maybe it’s just “notorious sinners” with whom we should not do business. Now, “notorious” doesn’t mean “worse”, but that their sins are well-known. So unless you are better than average, there will be a lot of folks who slip under your gaydar. You’ll sell that guy a necktie and never know that it was to take home to his husband. But unlike sexual identity, some things are pretty well known, like who the CEOs of the credit card companies are. That makes it “notorious” that they are lending money at interest, prohibited in the Hebrew scriptures over and over. Are you ready to refuse to bake the cake for the straight moneylender’s wedding? If not, your ethic is inconsistent, particularly if you are a Christian, since Jesus himself never spoke about homosexuality, but he clearly stood by the poor.

Folks, this is a justice issue. And there is an attempt underway to get HB 1228 out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and onto the Senate floor for a vote. It needs to die in committee.

This afternoon, I sent an e-mail message to every one of the Senate Judiciary Committee members:

Dear Senator _______,

I am writing to ask you to help keep HB 1228 off the table. While the bill purports to protect the free exercise of religion, and its sponsors would like for it to be known as the “Conscience Protection Act”, it is a thinly-veiled attempt to legalize discrimination against certain classes of people in our community, specifically our LGBTQ friends. Those who support it have no clear understanding of religious liberty nor of Mr. Jefferson’s vision of “a wall of separation between church and state”. Indeed, they seem to be interested in protecting only their own religious perspective.

As written, the bill would essentially allow anything to be protected, based only on a person’s appeal to his or her religious freedom, as it defines the exercise of religion as “including without limitation the ability to act or refuse to act in a manner substantially motivated by a person’s sincerely held religious beliefs, whether or not the exercise is compulsory or central to a larger system of religious belief” (Emphasis mine.) So, regardless of whether a given religion does, in fact, formally teach that doing business with a gay person is wrong, if a person believes it is (or just doesn’t want to), that person would be protected in discrimination by this act, as long as he or she claims “sincerely held religious beliefs”.

This bill is already damaging our state’s reputation and will have a negative impact on business and tourism — I am sure you have already seen the meme posted online showing the sign at the Arkansas border indicating that gays are not welcome here. It is certain to be challenged successfully in court, causing us to spend thousands of dollars defending the right to discriminate. If that happens, will the law also protect any of my tax dollars from being used, as defending discrimination is substantially contrary to the teaching of my religion (Christianity)?

Please help Arkansas overcome its parochial image by stopping this proposal to legalize injustice. I urge you to let this bill fail. It is the right thing to do.

Peace and all good,

Fr. Fred Ball, OFR
San Damiano Ecumenical Catholic Church
12415 Cantrell Road
Little Rock, Arkansas 72223-1727