Can i refuse to serve gays based on religious freedom
James Esseks,
Co-Director,
ACLU LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project
The United States Supreme Court just agreed to decide a case about whether a business can refuse to sell commercial goods to a queer couple because of the business owner’s religious values. A win for the business could gut the nation’s civil rights laws, licensing discrimination not just against lesbian, gay, double attraction, and transgender people, but against anyone protected by our non-discrimination rules.
In July 2012, Debbie Munn accompanied her son, Charlie Craig, and his fiancé, Dave Mullins, to the Masterpiece Cakeshop just outside of Denver to select out a cake for their wedding reception. When the bakery’s owner heard that the cake was for two men, he said he wouldn’t deal them a cake because of his religious views.
Debbie was stunned and humiliated for Charlie and Dave. As she has said, “It was never about the cake.” She couldn’t believe that a business would be allowed to turn people away because of who they are or whom they love. They might as well have posted a sign in the shop saying “No cakes for gays.”
The Colorado courts agreed with Debbie and dominated that the bakery’s refusal was unlawf
Working to build this society often means fighting support against attempts by individuals, groups, and organizations to deny basic human rights based on gender or sexuality. Religious beliefs are not a license to target, harass, or discriminate against or deny services to someone because of who they love or how they identify.
Read about our case against thrifty white and cvs pharmacies on behalf of client andrea anderson
Conversion Therapy
We believe in building a Minnesota where LGBTQ people are people, not problems to be solved or secrets to be kept. We know gender equity can’t exist when we allow people to be bullied and manipulated because of who they cherish or how they identify.
Conversion therapy causes immeasurable hurt and has been denounced by every mainstream medical and mental health association, including the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Treating someone’s queerness as something that needs to be fixed tells LGBQ people that they do not contain a place in this world, and it stops people from being proficient to truly thrive.
Minneapolis and Duluth both banned the practice within their
Using Religion to Discriminate
With increasing frequency, we see institutions and individuals claiming a right to discriminate based on religious objections. In every case, businesses, universities, social services agencies, and others argue they act not have to comply with laws prohibiting discrimination. The claims arise in many contexts, including:
- Hobby Lobby and other for-profit businesses refusing to provide insurance coverage for contraception for their employees;
- A for-profit organization objecting to providing its workers insurance coverage for drugs that prevent HIV;
- Teachers and students asserting a right to misgender students;
- Religiously affiliated schools seeking to deny LGBTQ people employment;
- Institutions claiming they are entitled to government funding and contracts even as they insist on discriminating; and
- Retail stores continuing to resist to provide services to same-sex couples seeking items for their weddings or wedding receptions.
- While the situations may differ, one thing remains the same: Religion is being used as an excuse to discriminate against and harm others.
Instances of institutions and individuals claiming a right to discriminate in the nam
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently ruled that prohibitions against discriminatory employment practices against the LGTBQ+ community under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are inapplicable to religious, private, for-profit companies that possess sincere, religious objections to gender nonconforming conduct.
Quick Hits
- The Fifth Circuit held that a private commercial business with honest religious beliefs against gender-nonconforming conduct is exempt from Title VII of the Civil Rights Behave of 1964.
- The judgment found that despite the Supreme Court’s holding that Title VII prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, prohibiting such discrimination is not a sufficiently compelling interest to override religious liberty in all cases.
In Braidwood Management v. Identical Employment Opportunity Commission, a panel for the Fifth Circuit held that a Christian-owned wellness center is exempt from Title VII because compliance would “substantially burden” its “religious beliefs about gay and transgender conduct.” The ruling, which was released on June 20, 2023, comes after the Supreme Court of the United States in its 2020 decision in The U.S. Supreme Court recently governed that businesses can now legally disallow service to LGBT people in specific circumstances. Its choice in 303 Artistic v. Elenis allowed a graphic planner to rely on her First Amendment right to free speech to reject to make wedding websites for queer couples. This notion single-handedly upended non-discrimination laws in the marketplace, but its effect is even more far-reaching: as early as the same day as the ruling, it was used to argue for the right to terminate LGBT employees. LGBT People Have Been Under Attack It was only 20 years ago that consensual homosexual sex was decriminalized in the Merged States. Since then, marriage was opened to same-sex couples (2015), and non-discrimination protections in employment were applied to many LGBT people across the state (2020). Oh, how things have changed. More than 400 anti-LGBT bills have been proposed in articulate legislatures in just the past year. Hearkening back to the most virulent homophobia of the 70s, LGBT people are now casually being referred to as “child groom
Did the Supreme Court Say Businesses Can Now Discriminate Against LGBT Customers—and Employees Too?