Here's some helpful advice for newsroom assignment editors and TV producers: put Hans Bader in your address book for the next time a controversy erupts regarding a state's religious-freedom protection laws.
Bader, a senior attorney at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute has an excellent piece out busting the media's anti-business myths related to the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act controversy. Here are a few highlights from his Wednesday post:
Press coverage has also often falsely implied that religious-freedom legislation gives religious businesses a broad right to discriminate against gays and lesbians, when in fact no such right has ever been recognized under the similar legislation that already exists at the federal level and in many states. As The Washington Examiner points out, “The words ‘gay,’ ‘lesbian’ and ‘sexual orientation’ are nowhere to be found in” its “language,” and “no religious freedom bill has been used successfully to defend discrimination against members of the LGBT community in the 22 years since Congress and states began adopting such laws.”
This is not because of the novelty or rarity of such laws: as The Washington Post’s Hunter Schwarz notes, many states have their own Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and “Indiana is actually . . . one of 20 states with a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” Instead, religious defenses to gay-rights claims tend to fail because the court finds a “compelling interest” justifying regulation, or finds no “substantial burden” on the business owner, which illustrates the limited reach of these religious freedom statutes as applied to discrimination claims.
But, in fact, there is already a Religious Freedom Restoration Act at the federal level, and as Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler has observed, it has already been interpreted to apply as a defense in lawsuits brought by private persons, by most (but not all) of the federal appeals courts that have considered the question, including “The U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 8th, 9th and D.C. Circuits.”
I have previously explained why businesses should be able to assert constitutional rights and other civil liberties as a defense to lawsuits by private people at this link. Thus, Kessler’s colleague Sandhya Somashekar was mistaken to write earlier that Indiana’s law is “fundamentally different” from the “federal” RFRA, which “protects only individuals seeking relief from government intrusions on their religious beliefs, while “[t]he Indiana law and others like it also apply to disputes between private parties.” In reality, Indiana’s law merely makes explicit what was already implicit in the federal law, as commentators like Reason’s Jacob Sullum and law professor Josh Blackman have observed.
You can read the full piece here.
