Christian Bakers, Gay Weddings, and the Supreme Court

The situation differs in some important ways from, say, those in which African-Americans were refused service at Woolworth's lunch counters in the nineteen-fifties. One factor that is not different, however, is the way that religion has often been cited as a basis for discrimination. “Most Protestant churches in the South believed slavery and, later, [American] apartheid and anti-miscegenation laws were ordained by God,” Eskridge told me. “Presbyterians, Methodists, Southern Baptists—respectable religions. Maybe several million people still believe that.”

Yet, from the standpoint of individual liberty, a mammoth corporation, such as Woolworth's, is different from a mom-and-pop business. The regulatory machinery has been hesitant to tell individuals how to behave on their own premises, no matter how repugnant their behavior may seem. To this day, as Eskridge observes, the federal employment-discrimination laws do not apply to businesses with fewer than fifteen employees, and housing-discrimination laws do not affect owner-occupied buildings with four units or fewer.

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