NOM BLOG

USA Today Surveys Religious Liberty Consequences of NY SSM

 

Cathy Lynn Grossman quotes two sources explaining the significant religious liberty concerns posed by New York's same-sex marriage bill:

Baptist Press spells out the fears of the faithful in an interview with Alliance Defense Fund attorney Austin R. Nimocks who says the religious protection written in the N.Y. law is inadequate:
It does not protect individuals. It does not protect private business owners. It does not protect, for example, a bed and breakfast owner who is using their own private personal property in the type of intimate setting that a bed and breakfast is. It does not protect licensed professionals. For example, it does not protect counselors. It also does not protect lawyers -- you may have a family law attorney who does not want to do a same-sex divorce because of their deeply held religious beliefs. It does not protect fertility doctors who may have a strict belief and only want to help [heterosexual] married couples because they believe a kid deserves both a mom and a dad.
This is echoed in Get Religion media critic Mollie Hemingway's focus on concerns of traditionalist faithful [...] Hemingway wonders:
Will same-sex marriage laws impact the rights of religious organizations to place children for adoption as they see fit? What about Lutheran parochial schools that have faced civil rights lawsuits over their honor code? Will Muslim doctors have the right to refuse to do in vitro fertilization treatment on a woman in a lesbian marriage? Will an evangelical referring a patient to someone without religious qualms over same-sex marriage lose her job or license? What about the civil servants who have religious objections to same-sex marriage? Apart from wedding vendors, there are all sorts of other lines of work where individual religious liberty and religiously-motivated objections to same-sex marriage where the questions persist. What about adoption services, for instance? How might public school curriculum change? Will that pose a challenge for any public school teachers who are Muslim, Jewish or Christian?

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