So much for separation of church and state
 

Too bad the same people so uncomfortable with prayer before town meetings are so comfy with the State intruding on the church.

Do these people hate religion or just the people that practice it?

Can you please give us examples of such? The state should really intrude on churches and other "non profits" and start taxing them albeit at a discounted rate.

exactly Del! :tro:

When the 'State' forces a baker in Arizona to bake a cake or a business owner to supply birth control and abortion coverage regardless of their individual religious beliefs it's far more an intrusion of State into the Church than being subjected to a short prayer is an intrusion of Church on the State.

And because some think the baker and business owner act out of hate is the reason I asked if those objecting to prayer hate the religion or the people?

Would you also have a problem with state taking issue with other forms of discrimination under the guise of "ones religious beliefs"?

You are one tough read. So many times you come on here as the champion of women's rights and gay rights. Yet you are against enforcing those rights when they are violated?? Wouldn't want to play poker with you as you are one tough read.

The baker has no right to prevent gays from marriage just as the business owner doesn't have the right to prevent women from having abortion/bc coverage. Doesn't mean they should be forced by the State to partake in it.

Bottom line I'm not all that hard to read as I think everyone mentioned above should be 'free' whether it be to marry, have access to B.C. and abortion or follow whatever religion they want to follow.


When the baker starts preventing gay marriages from happening and the business owner forces his female employees to not use BC or undergo abortions I then have a rights issue.

BTW I'd also have a problem if and when the reciting of the prayer becomes mandatory.

:zz::zz:Really

Shocked that you support discrimination like that. Sad

I think you need to realize some people don't live under a 'guise' of religious beliefs but 'actual' religious beliefs.

Imagine if someone came up with an argument that the people who wanted the baker to bake a cake were doing so under the 'guise' of being gay?

The similarities between Scalia law and Sharia law continue to boggle the mind...

:$:

Except one involves prayer and one involves murder.

This article does a pretty good job explaining why baking a cake does not equal free speech:

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/1...ery-broke-law/

A baker is not being "forced" to bake a cake. If the thought that any of their delicious goods might end up in the mouths of people attending a same-sex wedding is just too much for their religious feelings, then they have every right to give up selling cakes for money and give them away instead, to only male-female pairs of customers or whomever they feel deserves them. But once they decide to enter the marketplace with their product and (they hope) make a profit off of it, they must abide by federal and state laws against discrimination in the marketplace.

As to the birth control thing, Flying Spaghetti Monster only knows what the five conservative Catholics on the Supreme Court will decide, but health care is NOT a "gift" from the employer; it's part of the employee's compensation. The employee, in my opinion, anyway, should get to decide how her compensation is spent. Because, by refusing to pay for health plans that include birth control, companies are just forcing women to pay more for it, out of their wages, which is also being paid to them by the company. The company is "paying" for it every bit as much as if it's included in a health plan. Except that by doing it this way, they are, in effect, cutting the wages of female employees, which seems discriminatory to me, but then I am not a lawyer.

When a company can be executed (or have its execution botched, should it be an Oklahoma company) I'll believe it can have religion.

Either way, not the same thing as state officials selecting which religion is permitted to administer prayer at the beginning of tax-payer funded meetings.

I don't think this is a freedom of speech case. It's a religious freedom case. The court ruled baking a cake is not religious conduct and certainly that is correct. However putting on a uniform and carrying a gun certainly isn't religious conduct and yet this country has long recognized conscientious objectors on religious grounds.

Again imagine if your argument of feelings were turned the other way around and I said, "if being denied a rainbow filled wedding cake is too much for their gay feelings to handle they have every right not to marry and go on living together instead."

The employer not the employee decides compensation including healthcare.

The employee and not the employer decide where and for who said employee works.

However, if male employees are offered covered vasectomies and condoms under their plan, it would be discriminatory for females to be denied the same coverage.

“If we allow everything … where do you draw the line?” he asked.


scary. that's the whole point, is that freedom of religion is supposed to mean no state sanctioned, state supported religion. they are all supposed to be treated equally.
people are up in arms about the satanic statue going up next to the ten commandments-but you open yourself up to that happening the moment you put up a religious marker-you have to allow all, or none.
i see someone trying to have their prayer open a meeting and be disallowed, thus bringing about another case in court.


'In the event that you are still wondering what Bedrosian thinks about religious pluralism and tolerance in America, he isn’t hiding the ball here: “I think America, pretty much from Founding Fathers on, I think we have to say more or less that we’re a Christian nation with Christian ideology. … If we’re a Christian nation, then I would say that we need to move toward our Christian heritage.” Bedrosian evidently wrote a letter to the Roanoke Times in 2007 making this same point. There he argued that only Christians should enjoy freedom of religion in America, and that “one of the greatest moments in U.S. Senate history came when a Christian group recently shouted for God to forgive us during the opening prayer of a Hindu in the Senate.”'

unreal.

Remember the whackaloons who thought allowing gay marriage would lead to marrying goats, sheep etc.?

That didn't happen and neither will there be a sudden rise of satanic statues being erected.

Mmmm I wonder if we could convince Satanists to marry goats and sheep instead of sacrificing them? ;)

Again, the military is a state job, and baking a cake is the private marketplace. The military has separate rules about anti-discrimination.

This doesn't make any sense, as one doesn't make money off of being married. (insert gold-digger joke here) Read the link I posted.


The reason that men's contraception options are not mandated under the ACA is because only women can get pregnant. Pregnancy is a MEDICAL CONDITION, and one that can lead to a whole host of other, really unpleasant medical conditions. Trust me, those of us who have been through it can tell you it takes over your body- an acquaintance of mine died a few years ago delivering twins. The ACA legislation is set up to make it possible for women to choose whether or not they wish to take on this particular medical condition. The moment men can become pregnant, the ACA will cover any methods necessary for men to avoid pregnancy. Just as the moment women develop prostates, I'm sure the ACA will cover prostate exams for them.

For what it's worth, over-the-counter contraceptives are covered if a doctor writes a prescription for them.

To make it stupider, Hobby Lobby only objects to the Pill and IUDs because Hobby Lobby claims that they stop a fertilized egg from implanting and that's the same as abortion- despite the fact that there is no actual proof that this even happens, and that, even if it did, the WHO defines "conception" as the moment the egg implants into the uterine wall. So Hobby Lobby wants an exemption based on them making up what a word means, and ignoring science because shut up, that's why.

As this article points out, if Hobby Lobby is so opposed to abortion, they need to look at the products they sell:
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/20...tting-needles/

Exactly. And it shouldn't bother anyone. The Atheists put up a Festivus Pole, made out of PBR cans, next to the Christmas tree in Capitol Rotunda in Tallahassee this year:



Replete with the "Airing of the Grievances"

http://www.npr.org/2013/12/11/250200...ole-in-capitol

For the most part, people got a good laugh out of it, but they made a fair point

yeah, i remember the hyperventilating from one of the ubiquitous blondes on fox--gretchen carlson i think, because of that festivus pole. hilarious stuff.

love this line from the npr article:




"When a religious group seeks to co-opt the power and the prestige of the government for their religious message, the best way to dilute that co-opting of the power and prestige is to put up our own message."



was on slate, and this gem caught my eye regarding laws and religion...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2..._marriage.html

The State of North Carolina or any State for that matter, denying anyone the right to marriage, disallowing all the perceived benefits, real or not, whether in a church or a city hall is clear cut discrimination and should be dealt with at the Federal level.

Rejecting someone the right to marry and the benefits thereof is far more serious IMO than an individual baker denying a wedding cake based on religious grounds. Then again in this day and age we seem to prefer to sweat the small stuff and ignore everything else.

Kind of like worrying about the hypothetical effects of carry/conceal in bars while ignoring the dozens killed by guns in most major cities on most weekends and particularly in Chicago, a city with some of the most stringent yet comical gun laws in the country.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...es_should.html

As several others have pointed out, there is something strangely familiar about this argument in Town of Greece. Before it rejected racial segregation in Brown, the Supreme Court once said that if racial minorities interpreted a state’s policy of “separate but equal” as imposing a stigma upon them, “it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” Similarly, albeit in a very different context, the majority today says that if you respond to sectarian legislative prayer—indeed, to a systematic practice of state support for the majority’s religious beliefs—by saying that you have been separated out or excluded, you have made the wrong “interpretive choice”—you have chosen “to put that construction upon it.”