Not paid by the word.
Is the debate adequately framed for you to understand the nuances of ten turgid pages?
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MinnPost:
In Minnesota and other states, opponents of the bills have criticized the motivations behind them. LGBT rights groups and their allies see them as a tactic to keep them on the defensive and to help gin up grassroots enthusiasm and raise money.
According to Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, “This is right out of the Karl Rove playbook… I don’t think any of this is authentic,” he told MinnPost. “It’s cheap, lazy politics to benefit elections.”
That is a quite mean thing to say about Karl Rove. True enough. But mean.
N.Y. Times:
Many of its leaders and their allies appear at the Family Research Council’s annual Values Voters Summit. Other power centers include Liberty University (now a required stop on the campaign trail); conservative policy organizations like the American Family Association and Concerned Women for America; and Christian legal advocacy groups like Liberty Counsel (whose co-founder, Mat Staver, acted as Kim Davis’s lawyer) and the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal powerhouse behind the Hobby Lobby decision (whose president, Alan Sears, co-wrote a book in 2003 titled “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today”).
When talking about religious conservatives in America, we might perhaps conjure up an image of a farmer in Iowa or a small-business owner in Ohio who goes to church and holds traditional values. But the leaders to whom such conservatives deliver their votes have a distinct, often different, political vision.
When they hail religious liberty, they do not mean the right to pray and worship with other believers. Instead, the phrase has become a catchall for tactical goals of seeking exemptions from the law on religious grounds. To claim exception from the law as a right of “religious refusal” is, of course, the same as claiming the power to take the law into one’s own hands.
The leaders of this movement are breathtakingly radical.
When serving the wealthy is the political aim, both parties can drag red herrings across voter paths; and do. There are some sincere people in each party. And insincere ones, the most galling of which, to many, are the people who ignore what the First Amendment assures them; that they can exercise their religion without others interfering, as the one quote says, "[...] they do not mean the right to pray and worship with other believers. Instead the phrase has become a catchall for tactical goals of seeking exemptions from the law on religious grounds."
Friend Wardlow should be confronted by a halal food shop owner who claims on a religious basis to want his shop free of those who are unclean for having handled and eaten pork. Hog cuts are a strange version of "litmus" but it fits the Hobby Lobby garbage that the Roberts majority spooned out as if it were sound law. It is binding, yes. But sound, not a whit of it is, corporations not only being postulated from whole cloth to have human rights [Citizens United], but take a next step outside your mind and postulate they now can have religions that allow evasion of laws. Next step, womb police. If things were not so sad, they'd be funny.
Those actual humans who want to can congregate and talk in tongues [or Hebrew or Arabic] and we must honor that right so long as they are not trying to impose some holy writ they treasure on others, (me in particular) so bless the First Amendment. The best terminology to apply in First Amendment law is a two headed standard, freedom of religion - freedom from religion.
As in live and let live. That's not a complex idea at all.
Why is live and let live so hated? I like it. From the moment of birth to the moment of death, real humans exist and have the right to be left alone by religious zealots of any stripe, so why count angels dancing on a pinhead? That's done by dissembling pinheads; hello, John Roberts.