Clerks Have No Religious Right to Deny Gay Couples Marriage Licenses.
Clerks not doing their jobs should be reprimanded, and if the behavior continues they should be fired. All you have to do is compare these actions to the religious right biblical justifications used for anti-miscegenation laws to understand why this won’t stand. Just because there are churches and biblical scholars (notably Rushdoony,) who still propagate the notion that inter racial marriage is a sin doesn’t mean that clerks can refuse licenses to inter racial couples.
In October, the Alliance Defending Freedom—a far-right group dedicated to legalizing homophobia and criminalizing homosexuality—issued memos advising clerks in Virginia and Oklahoma that they are legally empowered to refuse service to gay couples. (Marriage equality recently became law in both states.) Now Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, usually abbreviated as AU, has fired back with its own memo, asserting the exact opposite: that clerks have no right to rebuff gay would-be newlyweds and that gay couples have a legal right to be free from such discrimination. AU’s memo is six pages long. But the ADF’s arguments are so fatuous and untenable that they could probably have been dispensed with in a paragraph.
The thrust of the ADF’s case is that forcing clerks to issue marriage licenses to gay couples qualifies as religious discrimination, and thus violates the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
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