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Repressive Reality Belies "Freedom-to-Marry" Rhetoric
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Posted: Friday, April 11, 2008

ARTICLE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Publication Date: April 10, 2008

In the land of the free, where we revel in our ability to live, work and worship as we wish, few public policy arguments pack a greater punch than appeals to individual liberty. That fact is not lost on gay-rights activists, who increasingly frame their bid for greater legal rights for same-sex couples in terms of sexual liberty and the "freedom to marry."

Lately, this public-relations ploy has hit a roadblock. High-profile clashes among religious groups and gay-rights activists have highlighted the uncomfortable fact that the expansion of sexual liberty for same-sex couples tends to result in a loss of religious liberty for their critics.

One of those conflicts put the Methodist leaders of New Jersey's Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association on the defensive last year. A lesbian couple wanted to use the association's pavilion for a civil-union commitment ceremony. The association refused, citing the United Methodist Church's official prohibition against same-sex unions on church property.

The couple filed a discrimination complaint with the state's Division on Civil Rights and, after a federal lawsuit filed by the association in defense of its First Amendment rights was thrown out, New Jersey officials stripped the association's pavilion of its tax-exempt status.

Dozens of similar flaps have erupted in recent months. In New Mexico, Elaine Huguenin, an evangelical Christian from Albuquerque, was brought before the state's human rights commission to defend herself against a discrimination complaint lodged by a lesbian couple whose commitment ceremony Huguenin refused to photograph for religious reasons. In California, eHarmony, the marriage-minded online dating service founded by evangelical Christian psychologist Neil Clark Warren, was sued for failing to serve gays, lesbians and bisexuals. And in Iowa, the YMCA of Greater Des Moines -- which exists, its mission statement says, "to put Christian principles into practice" -- was forced to change its definition of a family or lose federal funding after a lesbian couple complained to the city's human rights commission because they wanted a family membership, not an adult membership or a "member-plus" package with the same benefits and cost.

In Canada, where same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, the recent addition of "sexual orientation" to federal laws against "hate propaganda" effectively rendered public criticism of homosexuality a crime. Despite a narrow exemption for religious opinion, the Canadian Human Rights Commission has become notorious for aggressively targeting conservative and Christian organizations, writers and websites for censorship. Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based Christian organization that promotes traditional values, recently disclosed that its American broadcast content must be edited to clear Canadian speech code hurdles.

Gay-rights proponents often say that dispensing with the age-old definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman will maximize liberty, not limit it. They seek to reassure the majority of Americans who oppose gay marriage by arguing that individual religious institutions and citizens still could refuse to conduct or participate in same-sex weddings.

That may be true. But if same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land, religious institutions that hold to the traditional definition of marriage could be regarded in federal law as the equivalent of racist organizations. In a recent commentary in The Washington Examiner, Roger Severino of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonpartisan, interfaith public interest law firm, predicted that those religious institutions could be deluged with discrimination lawsuits, "stripped of access to government programs, have their tax exemption denied and even lose the ability to solemnize civil marriages."

Such scenarios should frighten freedom-loving citizens of any creed. That they already are unfolding across America should persuade us to look past the libertarian rationale for same-sex marriage to the troubling hints of religious repression to come.

-- Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.