Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Bake Us a Cake, or Else! | National Review Online

Bake Us a Cake, or Else! | National Review Online: "But in 2008, the New Mexico Human Rights Commission ruled that the Huguenins, by declining to use their artistic and expressive skills to communicate what what occurred at the ceremony, had discriminated based on sexual orientation. The commission ordered them to pay $6,637.94 in attorneys’ fees. The ruling cited New Mexico’s human-rights law, which prohibits discrimination in “public accommodations” (that is, “any establishment that provides or offers its services . . . or goods to the public”) based on race, religion, and sexual orientation — among other protected classes.

At the end of 2013, the New Mexico Supreme Court upheld the Human Rights Commission. It concluded that under the state’s sexual-orientation and gender-identity law, the First Amendment does not protect a photographer’s freedom to decline to take pictures of a same-sex commitment ceremony even when doing so would violate the photographer’s deeply held religious beliefs. Justice Richard C. Bosson, in a concurring opinion, made the additional claim that requiring the Huguenins to relinquish their religious convictions was permissible as “the price of citizenship.”"



'via Blog this'

No comments:

Post a Comment