K
kenofken
Guest
I cannot easily envision a scenario where people would use hate crimes law to force any church into gay marriage. The other situations regarding healthcare are fundamentally different. They involve public funding in the case of adoption. In the case of pharmacists, the law at least in my state does not require any individual pharmacist to act against thier own coscience. What it does do is prohibit pharmacists from actively obstructing patient care or making their own beliefs a patient’s problem. If a particular pharmacist wont’ fill birth control, it’s up to the pharmacy to make sure someone does. The situations that led to these laws passage inevitably involved individual pharmacists who abused their position of power and $100,000 plus jobs to bully patients, usually in a publicly humiliating way.
When it comes to churches handling their own eclesiastical affairs, courts have been very reticent to get involved. If churches could be successfully sued and forced to grant sacrements outside of their forms, surely it would have been done by now by bored atheists, divorced catholics who hadn’t gotten their annulments straight etc. If gays could force churches to do religious weddings, surely it would have been done by now in Canada or the UK, places with much more intrusive and politically correct hate statutes than our own.
When it comes to churches handling their own eclesiastical affairs, courts have been very reticent to get involved. If churches could be successfully sued and forced to grant sacrements outside of their forms, surely it would have been done by now by bored atheists, divorced catholics who hadn’t gotten their annulments straight etc. If gays could force churches to do religious weddings, surely it would have been done by now in Canada or the UK, places with much more intrusive and politically correct hate statutes than our own.