Religious accommodation laws unnecessary

Colorado probably will escape the shitstorm that has engulfed Indiana and Arkansas over religion protection bills. Colorado had one – HB 1171, officially titled the State Freedom of Conscience Protection Act – but it died in committee in March.

When I say it “died in committee,” I mean it was assigned to – of all places – the State, Veterans, and Military Affairs committee, where it was postponed indefinitely. Why a bill meant to sanction bigotry against homosexuality was sent to the committee that is mostly concerned with the National Guard and Colorado reservists, I’ll never know, but it was and now, thanks to whatever god you believe in, it’s dead.

That’s fine because Colorado doesn’t need a law saying that it’s okay to exercise your religious right to not do business with gays or lesbians or Democrats or Elvis impersonators or whoever you think is going to sully your pure white Christian bakery. In fact, we don’t need any state law in any state, and we don’t need the federal law that a Democratic president signed because he was trying to be a “good guy.” If you needed yet another proof of Bill Clinton’s hypocrisy, the fact that the president who used an expensive cigar to masturbate an intern and then left his semen spilled on her dress is the same president who signed a “religious rights” bill into law should be all you need.

We don’t need any of those laws because we have the First Amendment to the Constitution. The First Amendment says law and religion have to be kept separate, and it’s not a wide black line that separates them. That line gets really squiggly and hard to see sometimes, especially when the lawyers start messing around in it. But if you’re going to plunge into those legal waters, know that the rash of “religion protection” laws results from a long legal conflict between what Kelly Catherine Chapman calls “the clash between an individual’s right to be free from discrimination and an individual’s right freely to exercise religion.” In a 2012 paper published in The Georgetown Law Journal, Chapman noted that there is no common ground to be had, short of state law, and that when it comes religious freedom clashes with gay rights, it’s a zero-sum situation; for one to win, the other must lose.

That’s a pretty grim assessment and I doubt that even my optimistic appeal for common sense will make anyone bend in the least but I’m going to make it anyway, and I’m going to preface it with my own experience with religious discrimination vis-à-vis unconventional marriage.

When my wife and I decided to make Lohengrin’s trek, we had a religious problem. She was devoutly Roman Catholic, having graduated with honors from the local parochial school; I was a nominally Methodist sensualist who caused the pastor to winch on my rare appearances in his environs. My bride insisted she would be married in the Catholic church in which her parents had raised her; the rector of said Catholic church wouldn’t touch us with a ten-foot crucifix. We enlisted the considerably more liberal assistant rector who agreed to do the required pre-marriage "counseling," perform the service, and even allow the Methodist pastor to participate. In return, I had to sign a paper saying our children would be raised "in the Catholic Church." I signed it. The kids were raised Episcopalian.

My wife and I actually broke barriers that day; we were the first mixed-faith couple to ever be married in that church. And if you think that doesn’t compare to what gay couples face today, you didn’t live in Sterling, CO, in 1973. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, one-third of the county’s population was Roman Catholic, and of those, eighty percent were only one or two generations away from their European roots.

That experience taught me a few things about religious tolerance. It taught me that religion and religious belief is deeply ingrained in some people’s identities. Take away their religion, take away their church, and they are lost, bereft in a world they cannot navigate. Their religious doctrine, whatever it may be, is the lighthouse they look for when life casts them on a stormy sea. My wife has long since walked away from Vaticanworld and all of its fantastical mythology, but she still clutches her rosary every time she rides an airplane into the skies. I have said, only half-jokingly, that you can take the girl out of the Catholic church, but you can’t take the Catholic church out of the girl.

We overcame religious bigotry by being flexible and by finding people who would accommodate us. Now, of course, the only people who get married in the local Catholic church are Catholic couples because everybody else is getting married in back yards or on ranches or in parks or any of the hundreds of other places where nobody cares what church you go to.

So, I have a couple of suggestions to those who find themselves in the predicament of accommodating the public or faced with sexual bigotry:

First, for gays who want to marry, I’d suggest: Shop around and understand that there are people who cannot wrap their hearts and heads around your love and commitment. You’re asking people to be flexible; show some flexibility of your own. Seriously, do you want someone who openly detests you to have anything to do with what should be the most beautiful day of your life?

Second, for businesses, I’d warn: Be able to accommodate or have deep pockets, because you’re going to court, and rightfully so. Have a list of alternative businesses that can show the happy couple the sensitivity and commitment to service that you seem to lack. Learn some damn diplomacy in guiding a gay couple to someone who will be happy to have their business. Or, if you’re really a savvy business owner, put your pride on the shelf in the back room and take the business. Seriously, can you really afford to turn down business from one of the fastest-growing consumer segments in modern America?

Not that anyone will listen to this advice, of course. No, the Bible thumpers will continue to think they have God on their side, only to find that the Supreme Court thinks otherwise, and gays will continue to martyr themselves for The Cause, ruining their own matrimonial experiences with their disrespect of other people’s religious beliefs.

Kelly Chapman was right that it's a zero-sum situation, but there aren't any winners.

Lundberg doesn't get to define 'child'

The misogynist culture warriors keep trying to impose their definitions on a world that wants to think for itself.

Kevin Lundberg is the latest culture warrior who wants to inflict his peculiar brand of fantasy on the rest of us. Lundberg, a state senator from rural Larimer County, is posturing in opposition to a bill that would fund contraception for poverty-stricken teen-agers in Colorado because said contraception would include the use of intra-uterine devices. IUDs are against Lundberg’s personal misinterpretation of a religion, so he wants to impose that interpretation on the rest of us in the form of legislation.

At the heart of the matter is this little fact: IUDs provide contraception with a backup. That is, on the rare occasion that the device fails to prevent sperm from meeting egg, it will probably prevent the zygote from attaching to the wall of the womb.

The problem for Lundberg is he doesn’t know the difference between an inarticulated cluster of cells and a child. Here are Lundberg’s own words:

“The IUD is a mechanical device that makes (the uterus) an impossible environment for a young child to implant in the uterine wall.”

That’s right, in the Neverland that Lundberg wishes existed, a fertilized egg (referred to in medical terms as a “fertilized egg”) is a “child.” Problem is medical science says differently. Mosby’s Medical Dictionary defines a child as “a person of either sex between the time of birth and adolescence.”

Lundberg wants to impose a radical religious definition on a medical condition. I wouldn’t have a problem with this if Christian clergy went to medical school, healed the sick, repaired the injured, researched new ways to cure and prevent diseases, delivered babies, and pronounced us dead. But they don’t. Doctors do. And because doctors are the people most intimately knowledgeable of human life and death, they get to say when life begins. Everybody else is just making shit up.

Lundberg’s defenders would argue that he’s just “voting his conscience” and that his conscience is guided by his religious belief.

Bullshit.

Lundberg is among a growing number of middle-aged white men who see their power, and thus their privilege, slipping away. Power, you see, is a zero-sum game. If women and minorities are to gain the social and financial equality that is rightfully theirs, they need power, and that means taking it away from white men like Kevin Lundberg. And that scares the bejesus out of Kevin Lundberg.

His answer, then, is to deny women the power they need to become fully equal to men. The most effective way to do that has always been to identify them primarily by their ability to have children. Every civilization in history has hobbled women with an impossible choice: Subjugate yourself to child-rearing or face the disapproval of all around you.

Some women can afford a support system that allows them to transcend the usual duties of child bearing and thus achieve the equality that is their due. Others want to delay or forgo it altogether. There’s nothing Lundberg and his fellow misogynists can do about the former, so they focus on the latter. That means making up new definitions for, among other things, “child.”

But it's not just your garden variety misogyny that's at work here; it's a particularly cynical form. Lundberg knows as well as anyone that a good legislator keeps his religious beliefs separate from his work in the Legislature. Most of his Republican colleagues under the gold dome support the measure, and it’s sponsored by Rep. Don Coram, a Republican from Colorado’s 58th district. That’s in the southwest corner of the state. My wife and I both have family down there, and with the exception of a few tofu-serving restaurants in Durango, that’s as conservative as it gets in Colorado. Cultural reference: Novelist Olivia Newport, moved her Amish heroine from Colorado Springs to Coram’s southwest corner of Colorado in search of religious and moral purity. That’s how conservative those folks are.

As a social conservative, Kevin Lundberg is a poser. He pretends his “base” elected him to advance a biblical version of modern Colorado. The truth is, the Democrats regularly sacrifice innocents from Loveland in Lundberg’s 58th Senate District so they can hang onto Fort Collins and the 14th Senate District.

So Lundberg has the chance here to do the right thing, but he won’t. He knows the program to prevent teen pregnancy is going to be funded. He’s just trying to look good the folks at his church by defining a fertilized egg as a “child.” That doesn’t make him a good legislator. It makes him a cynic. I just hope Lundberg’s Republican colleagues aren't using the same dictionary.