The College Fix

Among the hubbub over a just-signed law in Indiana concerning the role of religious wedding professionals in same-sex weddings – including a threatened cancellation of a gamer convention – one professor is asking everyone to chill.

Mark Silk, professor of religion in public life at Trinity College, writes at Religion News Service that the law – modeled on the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act – and other states’ legislation are “far from guarantees of a religious right to discriminate”:

[State] RFRAs would have courts apply the standard of “strict scrutiny” when free exercise claims are made, meaning that when someone asks for a religious exemption from a law the government must demonstrate that it has a “compelling interest” and that it has advanced that interest by the “least restrictive means.” Thus, a sincerely cannibalistic sect could be prevented from exercising its faith by the compelling government interest in protecting human life and the least restrictive means of forbidding the killing and eating of people.

The same principle holds when it comes to serving mixed-race couples, another bogeyman of Indiana RFRA opponents:

As the Court made clear when it banned anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia (1967), the government has a compelling interest in prohibiting racial discrimination with respect to marriage. And the least restrictive means of prohibiting it is, simply, not to permit religious exceptions to laws banning racial discrimination in matters related to marriage. So even though it was once common to cite Scripture as the basis for opposing “race mixing,” the courts won’t give florists, bakers etc. the religious right to refuse their services to mixed-race couples.

What we should all be focused on, Silk says, is whether the Supreme Court strikes down same-sex marriage bans – in which case the state RFRAs will be pointless regarding gay marriage.

Read the column.

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