“By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the court has created a problem that only it can fix,” they wrote, noting that the ruling “enables courts and governments to brand religious adherents who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman as bigots, making their religious liberty concerns that much easier to dismiss.” From NY Times
This is from the dissenting opinion by Justices Thomas and Alito in Obergefell v. Hodges. Did you notice that they said “believe that” and did not say “discriminate against” as if a dissenting view could actually oppress a majority through the sheer power of its dissentingness (my word).
It is so offensive to Christians that a same-sex couple could be recognized as married that the Supreme Court — according to justices Alito and Thomas (and, probably, Barrett, soon)– must spare them this indignity.
What if you substituted race for sexual orientation? So a restaurant owner with a “whites only” sign should perhaps be spared the indignity of having to allow minorities into his restaurant because it is an infringement on his “religious liberty”?
The most obvious problem here is that it really doesn’t cost these bigots anything to allow gay couples to marry. Their right to marriage is not diminished in the slightest, except in the deep corners of their tiny imaginations where they might have to admit to their own bigotry. What is the difference between refusing to serve blacks or Jews or Italians, and refusing to serve gay men and women? We all recognize that bigotry is at the heart of the former.
And it is of the latter as well.