Supreme Court Justices Say Obergefell a ‘Problem’ for Religious Liberty

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A what point in time did some religious organizations adopt same sex marriage as a tenet of faith? I can’t think of any religious organization that accepted same sex marriage 30 years ago, while marriage between man and woman began with Adam and Eve.

In affirming as marriage a union which is in essence non-marital, the Court has opened not only a can of worms which will come back to haunt it, it has guaranteed future litigation for the forseeable future.

As mentioned above, what if a Catholic college offers housing for married couples, but not same sex couples. Wat if a Baptist minister declines to marry same sex couples? The cases sill multiply.

It’s a shame that so many religious people have bought the LGBT agenda.
 
Justice Thomas and Alito are absolutely correct. This decision opened the door to a full-fledged acceptance of LGBTQ ideology that are having second and third order affects on religious liberty. And unfortunately both Roberts and Gorsuch essentially agreed to the judicial re-writing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to accept pretty much everything the Equality Act was going to introduce into law. These two decisions will inevitably be used to the detriment of orthodox Christian bodies who hold to scriptural beliefs of gender and marriage.
 
People want bakeries in a way they don’t want to use Church facilities.
 
HerCrazierHalf said:
Aren’t the FLDS sects oppressed to a greater degree by prohibitions on polygamy? Are not Jehovah Witnesses oppressed when courts and/or agencies force their children to receive life saving medical treatments? What about Hindus’ oppression via Outback and Ruth Chris?
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Well, the courts have upheld making the Amish give schooling up to the 8th grade to their kids. Significantly, the courts have affected sacramental practices by the snake handlers, the chicken-chokers and the pony sacrificers. All that was found to be constitutional.

The Mormons gave up polygamy in order to be granted statehood for Utah and to be left alone. Basically, some control of religious practices by the government is allowed and does not run afoul of the Constitution. What other folks do outside of a particular person’s religion is, as the libertarians say, their own business.
 
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JimG said:
A what point in time did some religious organizations adopt same sex marriage as a tenet of faith?
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I don’t know, and why would it matter?

Most religions reject the Catholic notion of morals being historically unchanging.
 
JimG said:
As mentioned above, what if a Catholic college offers housing for married couples, but not same sex couples. Wat if a Baptist minister declines to marry same sex couples? The cases sill multiply.
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In the case of Catholic colleges policies on housing…it will probably depend on if they accept government funding or not. If they do, then they must follow government law about non discriminatory housing. If they don’t receive funding, then they are a private entity and are free to make the rules.

Forcing a Bishop to marry a SS couple will not happen as that is definitely crossing the line of church/state separation.

I understand the fear of slippery slopes but some are valid while others are not.
 
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Nepperhan said:
Yes, this thread is inaccurate. SCOTUS did not say a thing.
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Not sure where this is coming from; there is no mention of SCOTUS in either the thread title or the headline of the linked article. Only “Supreme Court justices,” which is true.

D
 
DaveBj said:
Not sure where this is coming from; there is no mention of SCOTUS in either the thread title or the headline of the linked article. Only “Supreme Court justices,” which is true.
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True. Which makes the statements by Thomas and Alito even more persiflage.
 
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Pattylt said:
I realize these restaurants sell beef which is against Hindu religion but so does every restaurant…what happened in these restaurants
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Those are just famous examples that glorify the eating of the sacred cow. Isn’t that those restaurants and the USDA defining cows as food, not sacred animals?
 
Tis_Bearself said:
As much as everybody wants to believe Thomas and Alito, what they wrote is dicta.
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speaking as a lawyer . . .

not so much dicta as “dissent” . . .

but then, much of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ greatest influence on the law comes from his dissents that were later accepted . . .
jredden92 said:
They aren’t forcing the Catholic church to accept gay marriage…
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That’s not what this case was about, though.

Rather, in this case, a Christian clerk was forced to issue marriage licenses for gay marriage, which she saw as forcing her to participate against her beliefs. The statements of the justices were in the dissent from the court not taking the case)

(now, that said, I probably wouldn’t conclude that religious liberty includes taking a paid governmental job while objecting to the ministerial [as opposed to discretionary or creative] tasks of that job]
VanitasVanitatum said:
People that have no regard for the Church do not prefer to use Church facilities.
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The deliberate selection of Christian bakers for gay wedding cakes, in order to sue them and have them sanctioned, shows otherwise . . .
Nepperhan said:
Basically, Thomas and Alito were running their mouths.
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No, not at all.

written dissents from declined cases are hardly rare.

They don’t happen for most declined cases, but we see some of these every term.

Nor are they irrelevant; they contain messages as to what type of case the court would be looking for in case on a siiilar issue that it would take . .
billsherman said:
(is there a religious position on speed limits,
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the moral notion that avoidable deaths are bad is behind having us all drive on the same side of the street . . .

to some extent, all law is the imposition of morality.

dochawk, esq.
 
dochawk said:
The deliberate selection of Christian bakers for gay wedding cakes, in order to sue them and have them sanctioned, shows otherwise . . .
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They only kept it to bakers, otherwise I would agree. They likely won’t put the actual wedding on the line.
 
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dochawk said:
not so much dicta as “dissent” .
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dochawk said:
written dissents from declined cases are hardly rare.
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That’s inaccurate. Thomas and Alito voted not to hear the case. There was no dissent. Thomas was just running off at the pen.

“The original post said Alito and Thomas had written a dissent; it was actually a concurrence.”


" The justices issued their opinion in a case concerning Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who had been sued for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The Supreme Court turned down her appeal, and the two justices concurred in that decision, saying the case did not cleanly present questions warranting the court’s review."

 
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dochawk said:
Rather, in this case, a Christian clerk was forced to issue marriage licenses for gay marriage, which she saw as forcing her to participate against her beliefs. The statements of the justices were in the dissent from the court not taking the case)
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Just think: Up until the nineties, VA had a clerk who refused to give licenses for interracial marriages. Clarence Thomas would have been prevented from marrying his wife because of "people of good will … refusing to alter their religious beliefs in the wake of prevailing orthodoxy.”

Its a good thing that the ACLU had won a lawsuit in the Supreme Court which said that interracial marriages could not be made illegal.
 
Nepperhan said:
Basically, Thomas and Alito were running their mouths. The court has not said a thing on any issue by refusing to take up the clerk’s appeal.
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It would appear that you have not read Supreme Court cases. It is not the least bit unusual for a dissenting opinion to be made in a case; and no one considers the justices who do so to be “running at the mouth”.

Justice Scalia said when Obergefell was decided that the Court had set itself up to a future conflict between the 1st Amendment and the newly found “right” for homosexual marriages. The dissenting opinion in the present case simply brigs that back into focus. In Obergefell, the majority opinion simply ignored the potential (as it was only a potential until the opinion was delivered) for conflicts between an enumerated right and a “found” right.

The Court sidestepped the issue in the current case based on the facts (the issue was a religious belief, but in a government position) and one can argue the Court should not have side-stepped the issue; but the matter is still not decided.

A prior case arising out of Colorado on religious grounds held for the religious belief, but it too side-stepped the issue. Rather than dealing with the mess Obergefell made, the Court decided on a novel approach; the owner of the wedding cake store “won” not on 1st Amendment grounds, but on the right to “artistic control” as each cake was individually made for that specific couple, and an artist cold not be compelled to create a work of art should they not desire to do so.

The dissent is correct; Obergefell has made a mess that the Court has to sort out. It may be that there is a minority of Christians (and possible other faiths - I suspect Islam may have the same faith reaction to the concept of gay marriage, and the may possibly be others), but it is not an insignificant minority when one considers all the evangelicals as well as the Church’s position. The mainline Protestant churches appear in the main to not have an issue, which is not to say they all accept gay marriage. But the very fact that it may be a minority does not provide the government the means to overthrow the 1st Amendment.

Whether the dissenting Justices were strongly dissenting that the case was not taken, or they werre simply repeating what Justice Scalia noted when the main case was decided, it is a means of indicating that they strongly want to address the conflict, and that is part of how the Court goes about deciding cases - a strong dissent means that something is likely to come under fairly intense scrutiny when the proper case is appealed to the SC. In short, you are seeing how the Court works on major issues.

It will be interesting to see what happens if and when a case makes its way to the SC on a clearer issue than the current one.
 
I wonder if it’s the congratulations that might be seen as problematical?
One doesn’t generally, I think, congratulate people on entering into a relationship associated with mortal sin.
Since the Catholic Church does not recognize such events as marriages and does not condone sex outside of marriage, it seems the Catholic university would be supporting people engaging in sexual activity which contradicts the teachings of the church.
 
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