The 'Religous Liberty' Bullies and Their Fight Against LGBT Equality

Today religious-liberty activists claim that bullies are the real victims because they cannot “express their views about homosexuality.” They claim that businesses who say “No Gays Allowed” are being oppressed because they are forced to “facilitate” gay marriages. And they claim that the real targets of discrimination are not gay people, who in 24 states can be fired from their jobs simply for being gay, but employers who can’t fire them.

Yet unlike recent anti-gay sloganeering, the religious-liberty campaign makes use not of theological arguments but of civil libertarian ones, and as such is much harder to recognize than the usual Bible-quoting bigotry. Indeed, Catholic-funded organizations such as The Becket Fund—named, not coincidentally, for the archbishop who chose martyrdom rather than obedience to the secular law—and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have co-opted the work of respected law professors such as Douglas Laycock of Virginia.