When wingnuts don’t believe in religious freedom

The right wants to allow discrimination, but is oddly quiet about seeking exemptions from things like property law

MATT BRUENIG

Judging from conservative reactions, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer installed a fascist tyranny in her state this week by vetoing a bill that permitted businesses to engage in anti-gay discrimination. If they are to be believed, conservatives who favored the bill did so out of a concern for the religious and individual freedom of vendors.

Historically, this has been a common last-ditch defensive posture for political factions that have lost their fight to deny others existential equality, whether on the basis of gender, race, sexuality or otherwise. First, they fight against existential equality outright, by limiting, for instance, equal access to schools for women, equal access to hotels for blacks, or equal marriage rights for gays. Second, once they’ve lost that battle, they try to defend pockets of discriminatory exclusion on some comical grounds that really it is the bigot whose rights are being trampled.

These arguments are generally disingenuous, but let us assume for a second that conservatives are serious about this. Let us say that people like Tim Carney, Ben Shapiro and Rich Lowry seriously believed that individuals should be able to exempt themselves from economic laws if they have religious objections to those laws. What kinds of things might that actually entail?

Well, we know for instance that apparently it entails the ability to establish discriminatory businesses. It also entails the ability to establish universities that forbid blacks or interracial couples, as Bob Jones University once did for purportedly biblical reasons. Since these business entities have religious objections to anti-discrimination laws, they should be exempt from them, conservatives claim.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/03/04/wingnuts_are_liberty_hypocrites_look_at_the_religious_exemptions_they_curiously_oppose/