The news out of the State House is that SB 344 is not getting called down for Second Reading on today, the deadline. I never got around to reviewing it in any detail, but I believe SB 344 was initially much like SB 100 without protections for transgender people. With some more or less significant amendments in the committee report, that was the vehicle for the LGB(T) Rights / Religious Freedom legislation this year that made it out of committee. (As I said before, I don’t necessarily agree with the “religious freedom” nomenclature since one person’s freedom is very often another person’s burden, but I lack a better short hand, so I’m sticking with it.) Without a vehicle having cleared one chamber or the other, it is very unlikely that LGBT Rights/Religious Freedom language would be allowed as an amendment in some other legislation as the bills switch houses.
I’m a white, heterosexual, upper-middle class, cisgender male without any particular religious motivations, so I have the luxury of being philosophical about such things; but I have a hard time feeling bad about the death of this thing. It reminds me of Jonathan Coulton’s half-pony, half-monkey monster from Skullcrusher Mountain. (Premise: Evil genius is trying to woo a love interest he has abducted):
I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?
Despite the good intentions of a lot of well-meaning legislators, I think the best we were going to get out of this was a ruined pony.
The problem, as I see it, is that something has to give. The two values the legislators are trying to balance are incompatible. This is not a situation where two things we like mostly co-exist but occasionally clash in incidental ways. To be clear, I think religion generally is mostly compatible with equal rights regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. If you read the Bible, there is a ton of stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with gender or sex. But, this specific legislative fight was never about a fear that LGBT rights might somehow interfere with, say, a religious organization’s ability to care for the poor. Rather, a driving force for the religious concerns lobbying the General Assembly is a conviction that gay relationships are sinful. On the flip side, a primary concern of LGBT groups is discrimination motivated by that sort of religious world view.
Maybe I have the parameters of the fight all wrong or maybe I am not sufficiently optimistic about the possibility for creative solutions in this context; but it seems to me that when push comes to shove and the competing value systems come into direct conflict, one is going to have to take priority over the other. At the moment, it looks like the Unstoppable Force of LBGT rights versus the Immovable Object of Religious Freedom. Eventually, in these situations, in turns out that the force was not unstoppable or the object was movable. I have my suspicions, but clarity can be frustratingly slow in coming. And, without clarity about which one is going to take priority, the resulting legislation is going to be a half-pony, half-monkey monster.
I don’t think this is going to end well for the Religious Right for a number of reasons, one of them being the lack of argument integrity. If gay activity is sin, well, so is gambling (e.g. lottery), legislator unethical behavior and many other items that seem just fine as long as people are making money from them. Even the uninitiated recognize that as hypocrisy.. When it comes down to it, it’s not so much that they are against sin as they are for repressed sexuality and the eagerness to snoop into bedroom activity, an odious attitude rejected by most folks.. It’s pretty hard to get public support from a public that advocates “live and let live”, when the noisy, self-righteous base is comprised of individuals who follow perverse authoritarian thinking and expect their representatives to carry out their perversity. When politics require compromise and the base requires compliance, I wouldn’t want to be peacemaker..
I will bet my entire stack that the religious bigots eventually lose. If not this session then the next.
I tend to agree, but what gives me a little pause is that — at various points in human history — gay people were more accepted than at other times. It hasn’t been a straight progression to more acceptance. So, whatever factors caused gay rights to lose ground in the past could crop up again at some point.
Dog, your point that the acceptance of LGBT has swung each way over time. I recall the film “Little Big Man”. One of the characters was Little Horse, a gay and transsexual. Little Horse was accepted. Below is a quote from the film. He is considered to be of Two Spirits.
[an obvious “two-spirit” Indian approaches Jack] Little Big Man! You have returned. Don’t you remember me? That hurts me deep in my heart.
Jack Crabb: [voiceover] It was Little Horse; the boy who wouldn’t go on the raid against the Pawnee. He had become a “heemanee” for which there ain’t no English word. And he was a good one, too. The Human Beings thought a lot of him.
“Rather, a driving force for the religious concerns lobbying the General Assembly is a conviction that gay relationships are sinful.”
It is less about the idea that these relationships are sinful and more about being forced to practice their religion in a certain way.
I am a Christian and although I don’t believe the Bible speaks against same-sex committed relationships (it is about rape and idol worship in my read), I can understand why a church would be fearful that a civil rights law would force them to perform a same-sex marriage against their beliefs.
Any thoughts as to why the special focus on gay people and their rights? The Bible covers a lot of ground — e.g. social justice, war, violence — where the government sets policies that might be contrary to the Biblical interpretations of various religious groups. But most of the heat and focus seems to be on gay people and abortion.
Honestly, I think it is simply because it isn’t as common, in terms of same-sex relationships. Divorce is quite common, so you don’t see churches refusing remarriage that often. Most of the people at church don’t have a close relationship with gay couples.
As for abortion, that is a matter of protecting the innocent. We have laws against murder, so the perceived murder of children is a pretty hot-button issue. Even someone pro-life has to admit that an human 1 second before and 1 second after leaving the mother’s body is pretty much the same. There is no black and white time that someone becomes a human, other than as soon as their cells start dividing.
My own views on that as a Christian have matured, IMHO, as I’ve seen more evidence that women that want to have an abortion will have an unsafe one if need be. In that case, two people die instead of one. For now, I’ve become pro-choice as I’ve also learned that the best way to prevent abortions are by preventing pregnancies, and places like Planned Parenthood really help with that.
Someday, I hope to see science and my faith progress to the point where a father can “adopt” his unborn child if he wants to and raise that child in an artificial womb, and pro-life groups can help match same-sex couples that want to adopt to unwanted pregnancies. Someday…
Great post, Jason. Your idea of an artificial womb will likely happen.
In a Family Law class I teach, I have an interesting assignment I give to the students.
Currently, fetuses can be freely aborted if they have not reached the point of viability. Currently, that is around 22-23 weeks. But as medical science progresses, this time frame will be pushed back
I tell the students that we have invented an artificial womb where fetuses can be raised from conception. When artificial wombs are available, abortion would be illegal because fetuses can be raised in artificial wombs and viability has been pushed back to a zygote.
The question I pose is should all unwanted fetuses be raised in artificial wombs when the cost will be many thousand of dollars. I then tell them that the cost of these artificial wombs will be around $100,000 per fetus. Is it still desirable to use artificial wombs when the cost of doing so is in the trillion of dollars? Most answer yes, apparently not grasping the prohibitive costs of doing so.
If we’re talking legal thought experiments in the days of an artificial womb and amble unborn child adoptions:
I presume that a father has the right to claim an unborn baby from the mother if she does not want the baby.
Does she still have to pay child support to the father? If not, why not?
Conversely, if the father does not want the baby, and the mother continues to carry the child to term, does he have to pay child support? If so, why?
Can either the father or mother that does not want the baby have their parentage held private by the courts?
Good questions. Since there would be no abortions, all unwanted fetuses would go into artificial wombs. Father would likely have the right to parent them. And under our current child support system, the mothers would have to pay support.
Your second question is well settled. Fathers must pay support for all children they sire.
The answer to the last question is probably no. If parentage can be established it will be. That is at the heart of our birth records system.
These are just my quick thoughts, however. But I cannot envision a time when millions of fetuses that would otherwise be aborted would be harvested and placed into artificial wombs. The cost would be ruinous and many of the babies would have to be shunted into foster care.
Because that’s what gets people to donate to the special interest groups and gets people elected. The only reason for RFRA was that Smith/Clark/Miller needed a “win” to justify their existence to their donors.
I’m against abortion, but I also think that the current approach is asinine. Better to give any young girl who wants them an IUD, birth control as needed, and sex ed that doesn’t push a viewpoint but gives what information people need to know about their bodies. Break the cycle of poverty and crime that comes from teenage pregnancy.
For those who end up pregnant and don’t want to be parents yet, pay all the pre-natal doctor bills and vitamins to make sure the kid is healthy. Pay for the birth. Set them up with someone wanting to adopt and provide counseling.
If they want to keep the kid, set them up with real child care so they can work and food stamps so the kid’s body can properly develop. Life is going to be hard for them, so help them out.
(And, yes, both cases would end up with an IUD at the end too if you’d like any further aid. I’m all for helping people out, but I think it’s reasonable that precautions be taken.)
Or, we could do what we are doing now, which appears to be designed to punish people for having sex the rest of their lives, maybe with the hope of driving people to use faith-based aid and become church members. I’m open to hearing why else.
Joe, you touch on a gaping hole in this problem: the anti-abortion people refuse to examine the whole problem. If you want to talk about abortion, you need to talk about sex education, birth control and making sure that you are not just “pro-birth”. You can’t stick your head in the sand and only discuss abortion. We know that when countries have excellent sex education and freely available birth control (e.g., Belgium and many other countries), their abortion rate drops to around 7 per 100K. I believe ours is around 22 per 100K, and where abortion is totally illegal (e.g., South America) it’s in the 30’s and 40’s per 100K. It’s like being on a trip and arguing whether you are going to turn right or left and not having a discussion about where you are and where you want to be.
As I indicated earlier, the primary strategy is sexual repression, where folks actively pretend that we don’t have to discuss some realities when, in fact, they are all related. Some people actually think that if you pass laws against having sex, that will happen. Laws have to reflect some sort of reality and be enforceable.
I’m still waiting on the faith-based alternative to Planned Parenthood that offers all the same services save abortion to women.
Joe, how much time do you have?
Stuart, well state. Laws that do not reflect reality and cannot be enforced cause people to disrespect the rule of law.
An additional comment related to Doug’s initial post: Whether people agree or disagree with being gay, it happens, and gay people are pretty much like everyone else and need to be protected from arbitrary nastiness and mean-spirited people who decide to stand in judgment of them. As long as we live in a country where there is some assumption that people are equal in fundamental ways, we need laws that are realistic and enforceable and protect everyone. The law notwithstanding, it is simply not practical to prohibit accountable people from engaging in mutually agreed on activities in private. Didn’t John Stuart Mill have a discussion about that a few years ago? Sort of says something about our legislature and their awareness of fundamentals. Maybe they think that thing in their oath about supporting the Constitution was just nice-sounding words.
Thanks again for your careful thought and providing a forum for this discussion.
It seems to me that the religious right is losing and they know it. That’s why they pushed so hard for the marriage amendment and “right away”. As we can see that was a losing battle. Now they are retrenching into the “don’t make me do same-sex marriages in my church” extreme. Well, there’s this little thing called the first amendment, so don’t worry. Indiana ain’t Canada.
The controversy over RFRA was NOT that the government would force someone to do something against their religious views – that’s the federal position and I support that. (Although I don’t know why the first amendment wasn’t enough for that.)
The Indiana RFRA extended that right to keep individuals against individuals action legal. That’s where we’re going to get into the sticky wickets of marriage flowers and so forth. This will get worked out – but the politics of it aren’t clear to me yet.
BUT I urge every medium sized city in Indiana to get their ordinances in order – and if there is a ground swell across the state. it will be hard for the Right to deny – or to effectively fight against it.
Look, if even MARTINSVILLE understands this issue, then what’s the big deal?
Back to Doug’s initial post, I think this whole mess shows that the legislature is not thinking about what the public, or the common good, wants as they are thinking about staying with the ideological narrative. That, to me, is a very important message that should help people decide who they want to support in an election. If I’m a Republican and I want local control and small government, that is not a particularly high priority for my Republican representative.