General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Todd Starnes: ministers who don't perform gay weddings should prepare for hate crimes charges [View all]Yo_Mama
(8,303 posts)It's your right to advocate your positions, but I don't see any chance of success. It's hard to change the Constitution, as it should be.
I have included some legal stuff below, but common sense should tell you that your position contradicts itself. When states wouldn't issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, various churches were still "marrying" them. The religious RITE is not the civil RIGHT. What makes the marriage civilly valid is the state's issue of the marriage license, and what makes the religious marriage a civil one is not the rite, but some form of subscription and witness by the officiator (A SEPARATE STEP) testifying that the persons involved went through with it.
It would have been a profound violation of the First Amendment for state governments to tell religious bodies that they couldn't perform these marriages before when they weren't civilly legal, and thus it would be a profound violation of the First Amendment for a government to tell religious bodies that they had to perform them now.
Nor is this just a holdover - remember that religious rights were expanded under Clinton after the Scalia-written law which abridged the constitutional scope of religious freedoms. RRFA basically overruled the SC:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000bb-1
The case in question was the denial of unemployment benefits due to a peyote-use firing contested on the grounds that it was religious exercise.
Denying a religious rite or ceremony due to non-qualification under the religious standards is so fundamental a religious act that, were it to be abrogated, it is hard to see how the First Amendment "free exercise" provision or Establishment clause could retain any meaning whatsoever. In essence, the government WOULD be establishing a religion.
You don't want that, even if you think that you do.
I don't write this to be rude, please understand. You may know that the First Amendment exists, but you do not understand it at all.
Consider, for example, Hosanna-Tabor v EEOC, decided 9-0 in 2012:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-553