Until I read Ramesh's post below, I hadn't seen Margaret Renkl's fundamentally misguided op-ed about religious liberty in today's New York Times. Like me, Renkl writes from Tennessee (she's in Nashville; I'm in Franklin), and she uses a recent Tennessee incident where a Dickson County baker refused to design and bake a cake for a gay wedding as a launching pad for an attack on America's most fundamental First Amendment freedoms. Unfortunately, she makes two important legal errors.
First, she gets the primacy of American law exactly backwards. She formulates religious liberty like this: "In this country, citing religious or spiritual convictions is often a surefire way to get out of doing something you're required by law to do." This is a common framing on the left. Essentially, it's an argument that religious freedom is an intrusion into the law and that religious people are engaged in a form of special pleading — seeking rights and exemptions unavailable to other Americans.
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