Ministers Threatened with Jail/Fines For Refusing to Officiate at Gay Weddings

[FatAndFaithless]

Fucking goddamn apostates.

The Knapps ain't worth our time debating here.

Some weeks ago I debated with a friend of mine(who happens to live in the same Idaho city as the subject church/business) about why I agreed with laws that criminalized people falsifying applications to get jobs on farms to video animal abuse. He would go on and on about how the cows were being rapped and such. I told him his argument wasn't compelling that because unfortunately....if you are going to give people the right to privacy....some people are going to abuse that right to help them facilitate doing bad things.

The Knapps might be pieces of shit trying to game the system...or they might be sincere adherents to their religion. Unfortunately if you are going to grant people the freedom of religion....your just going to have to accept that some people will use it as cover to engage in behavior you don't like.

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emphasis mine.

That might make a difference. Should be interesting to see if it does.

I could see where they might be required to facilitate non religious aspect of the marriage....i.e. the license...the flowers...perhaps even the venue. I just can't see how a court could credibly compel them to preform a religious wedding ceremony if they don't want too.

The religious ceremony isn't the point, and never was. You'll notice I emphasized that a few posts back. If this business has a venue that sells marriage licenses (a document that directly enters into the US government), they have to follow the non-discrimination laws that any other purveyor of these documents does.

If their advertised product/service was just "traditional weddings that follow X, Y, Z", then that would be the product/service they sell, and people who wanted one of those would purchase it (and I don't even know if I'm comfortable with that, but it would be legal). But dealing in government documents is not something that allows for discrimination, especially based on religion.