You Can't Be a Conscientious Objector to Wedding Photography

An appellate court in New Mexico ruled that a professional photographer was wrong when she refused to shoot a 2006 commitment ceremony involving a same-sex couple. The decision comes amid a national fight over whether insurance companies should be required to provide contraceptive coverage for employees of companies that object to such practices.

Show me a society in which any human contract can be barred or nullified on religious grounds, and I'll show you anarchy. Theoretically, anyone could justify any behavior simply by claiming religious primacy.

Society simply cannot function under such conditions, yet this is precisely the sort of society we'll get if we follow the template being offered up by the religious right. They would have us blur the distinction between the individual's "vertical" relationship with his deity and "horizontal" relationships among equal human beings. Then, ultimately, they'd destroy them - as surely as they'd tear down the wall of separation between church and state.

Their repeated assaults on individual liberty in the name of preserving their own religious beliefs is a red herring. No one is threatening those beliefs in the least. No one is keeping any Christian, Muslim, Jew or Hindu from worshiping his or her god, any more than a same-sex couples is threatening someone else's marriage by exchanging vows. But the fundamentalist zealots want us to believe that they're threatened. And they think they just might get us to believe it if they keep shouting loud enough and long enough about their own supposed victimization.

Read the rest of the story at The Provocation.