Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Should a Baptist minister be required to marry a gay couple?  Of course not.  Should an adoption service run by the Catholic church be required to place children in gay households?  Probably not.  Andrew Sullivan asks the obvious followup:

But how far do you go? Should a Catholic caterer, for example, be able to refuse to provide food for a second marriage? My own view is: yes. But then I’m a libertarian in many ways. I see protecting religious freedom in the civil sphere as a core principle. And by exposing such religious prejudice so baldly, and allowing the market to disadvantage the bigoted, we may even help jump-start the conversations that will eventually persuade people that they’re wrong.

God knows, if Andrew is OK with this, I suppose I should be.  And I think there’s a strong case to be made that in practice this might not be a big deal.  After all, do same-sex couples really want to hire photographers and caterers who make it clear they loathe them?  Probably not.  But then, you might have asked the same thing 50 years ago: do Southern blacks really want to eat at lunch counters where they obviously aren’t welcome?  As it turned out, yes.

This has become the latest front in the gay marriage wars, and I’d be careful about ceding too much ground here.  Laws guaranteeing religious freedom are fine as long as they cover actual religious practice.  But once they start covering bog ordinary commercial establishments that don’t have even a tenuous connection to a church and want to discriminate merely because they don’t like gays — well, that’s a line that gets pretty hard to draw pretty fast.   What’s worse, in some places it’s a line that would essentially take over entire towns.  If a caterer can refuse to sell me a wedding cake just because I’m gay — despite state law that would normally outlaw such discrimination — can a landlord refuse to rent me and my newly married partner an apartment despite fair housing laws saying he has to?

I haven’t thought this through in a lot of detail, but I’m uncomfortable extending these “religious freedom” exemptions beyond actual religious establishments.  I’m all for compromise that turns down the volume on the culture wars, but once these laws are in place they run the risk of cementing bigoted practices in place for years or decades longer than they’d otherwise survive.  Count me as a skeptic that, in the long run, this is workable.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate