My latest column on the Guardian is up: “There’s a silver lining in the religious right’s onslaught of discrimination“.
From evangelical colleges to Catholic schools, America’s religious right is pulling out all the stops to keep enforcing their prejudices on others, even after Supreme Court rulings that went against them. In this column, I argue that this is a good sign for those of us who care about equality! To find out why, read the excerpt below, then click through to the full piece:
Wheaton College, an evangelical Christian college in Illinois, announced last week that it was dropping health insurance for all its students rather than comply with Obamacare’s contraception mandate. Under the compromise offered by the Obama administration, religious employers that object to birth control can notify their insurer, who then provides it to covered individuals without involving the employer, but Wheaton argued that even having to state their objection was an intolerable violation of their religious conscience – a claim that would undoubtedly lead to chaos if it were widely accepted.
Along the same lines, since the US supreme court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in Obergefell v Hodges, some county clerks and probate judges in conservative states like Kentucky and Alabama have have announced that they’ll no longer issue marriage licenses to anyone, gay or straight, rather than face a discrimination lawsuit they’d be certain to lose for turning away a same-sex couple…
Continue reading on the Guardian.
Image: Public domain, via Bhautik Joshi.