Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination Quotes

“An evangelical’s reason for refusing to bake same-sex wedding cakes is manifestly NOT to avoid contact with gay people on equal terms. It’s to avoid complicity in what she considers one distortion of marriage among others...The refusals of the bakers and photographers, charities and universities discussed here have nothing like the sweep or shape of racist practices… they’re about avoiding complicity with certain choices, not contact with groups. -p. 191”
― Ryan T. Anderson, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“...the main thing left for legal coercion to accomplish would be the symbolic value of making outlaws of their ideological opponents. It would be the illiberal goal of stifling moral dissent. -p. 187”
― Ryan T. Anderson, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“Indeed the most important difference between laws on SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) and race - or religion or disability or sex or virtually any other protected status - is this: over and over, SOGI laws impose gratuitously on important personal and social goods. They’re not simply about preventing ‘no LGBT people allowed’ policies. They’re designed and applied to needlessly penalize conscientious refusals to participate in morally controversial actions to which many people reasonably object, wounding moral and religious integrity and depressing pluralism. And that’s a sharp contrast indeed. - p. 185”
― Ryan T. Anderson, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“But here we aren’t debating trivial choices that social conventions happen to render disrespectful. We’re dealing with choices people make to preserve their integrity. -p. 181”
― Ryan T. Anderson, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“The law isn’t about siphoning evil out of every heart. It’s about setting up and keeping up the conditions under which everyone can adequately pursue the basic goods of human life. -p. 176”
― Ryan T. Anderson, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“You can pick your projects at will, but not your moral and religious convictions… If one option (project) is off the table but enough alternatives remain, you can pursue another without seeing your self-determination suffer. To protect the latter, the state need only leave you a rich range of options. Not so with religious and moral integrity. - p. 138”
― Ryan T. Anderson, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“...it isn’t simply that the benefits of liberty barely outweigh the costs. It’s that the benefits to people’s integrity or livelihood are great; and the costs vanishingly small. -p. 119”
― Ryan T. Anderson, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“but that they would be forced to participate in or help celebrate”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“The evangelical refuses to bake for a same-sex wedding because she objects to same-sex marriage, based on her belief that it isn’t marital (along with many other relationships—sexual and not, dyadic and larger, same- and opposite-sex), according to her religion. Nowhere need her reasoning refer to the partners’ sexual orientation—or any ideas or attitudes about LGBT people, good or bad. Her choice might yet be unjustified or burdensome or worth coercing. But before assessing that, it’s important to get the classification right. Why?”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“invidious is the fact that those ideas about African Americans are unfair and socially debilitating. Some”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“Whether a distinction is invidious—rooted in harmful attitudes or ideas about a group and so likely to spread contempt—depends not on whether it’s conduct- or status-based but on the reasoning behind it. Invidious distinctions are rooted in unfair, socially debilitating attitudes or ideas about people’s worth, proper social status, abilities, or actions. By”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“Then why should the side effects of your exercise of religious freedom effectively “impose your religion” on those affected—or undermine their own freedom of religion?”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“convictions, as it did by requiring the Hahns and Greens in Hobby Lobby to lose millions, or their business. Corvino”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“twenty-three years of RFRAs to produce anarchy,”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“Yet it is the dissenters seeking a peaceful settlement”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“We will suggest he is led to these conclusions by a distorted view of the social and legal landscape. Where exemptions give believers an equal shot at living with integrity, Corvino sees favoritism. Where statutes give the occasional religious liberty claimant her day in court, he sees a teeming mass of claims about to choke the workings of government. Where a sprawling body of regulations sits, rife with exemptions for everyday secular purposes, Corvino sees a system of laws so necessary in its details that religious exemptions might be ruinous. In conservative professionals facing steep fines on conscience, Corvino sees new Puritans; and in their bureaucratic harassers, he sees freedom fighters. Down the path to exemptions he sees a slippery slope; when society doesn’t tumble, he imagines it stopped by legal barriers that aren’t there, because they aren’t needed. And at the horizon—where others search for harmony with the transcendent, their path cleared by freedoms of conscience and religion—he sees at best a socially useful mirage.”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“Corvino, whose contribution is—like its author—sophisticated, civil, and well-informed.”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“Do not let the focus on bakers and florists obscure this point: It is currently legal in most states to fire people for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender; to refuse to rent them apartments or hotel rooms; even to refuse to tow their cars or repair their furnaces. Should this change? Anderson and Girgis argue that it should not. 4.3.5”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“Why the double standard of counting dignitary harm (in addition to material harms) against conscience claims, but not at all against speech? This is a challenge to which progressives have no response” (p. 172). I have two responses, both of which show that there is no double standard. First, Anderson and Girgis get the relevant distinction wrong. It is not between freedom of speech and freedom of conscience/religion but between freedom of speech and freedom of action. The Kleins of Sweet Cakes engaged in both, and both were an expression of religious conscience. It was their refusal of service, however—their action, not their speech—that triggered government sanction. The right question to ask, then, is why count dignitary harm against freedom of action (religious or otherwise) but not against freedom of speech (religious or otherwise)? The answer to that question is that in general, actions pose greater risks than speech.”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“the ultimate objective of antidiscrimination law is not to punish haters (not all discriminators are haters) but to ensure equal access in the public sphere. This”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“Anderson and Girgis insist that it is not, because the baker’s “reason for refusing to bake same-sex wedding cakes is manifestly not to avoid contact with gay people on equal terms” (p. 191). But that’s a strange claim, given that the bakers are refusing to sell gay people the very same items they sell to other customers. They do so precisely because they judge same-sex relationships to be morally inferior.”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“It is not surprising that efforts to keep gay, lesbian, and bisexual people in their place arise in the wedding context. Sexual orientation is a relational property; it’s about the sex or gender of the people with whom you have relationships or desire to have relationships. It manifests itself in the context of those relationships, and unless it manifests itself, would-be discriminators can’t target it.”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“there’s a significant difference between granting exemptions to a finite, dwindling group of employers during a transition period and granting exemptions to any employer who might ever raise a religiously framed objection, in perpetuity. A”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“Justice Scalia in Smith, citing Reynolds: If the law’s authority were to vary based on the diverse moral and religious commitments of citizens, then all persons could become a law unto themselves.”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“Some views are truly bad enough that they deserve repudiation rather than accommodation. To”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“But suppose they are correct. Suppose we grant that there is always some good when individuals—even Bardwell—harmonize their actions with their moral convictions. My main difference with Anderson and Girgis concerns what happens next. For even if it is good for Bardwell to achieve such harmony, it does not follow that the rest of us should make it easy for him to do so. The blurring of this distinction—between what the religious claimant should do and what everyone else should do—is a pervasive problem in their discussion. The”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“integrity—in their specific sense of harmony between belief and action—may lack value when the underlying belief is badly wrong. And one way to determine when the belief is badly wrong is its tendency to cause harm to others.”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“A person is better off for having performed sincere religious acts even when they rest on false premises.”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“the law cannot respect the conscience of flesh-and-blood human beings unless it also recognizes conscience claims brought by the corporations they form.”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination

“Applying this legal rule, courts have required accommodations”
― John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination