This is why religious freedom is a serious concern for me. I have lived in countries where governments do discriminate on the basis of religion, where the church some belongs to or someone’s religious beliefs could lose them a job, keep them from educational options, or could invite persecution or violence. I have idealistically wanted to believe the US was beyond that. But some of what I’ve seen in social media and in newspaper articles post Obergefell makes me wonder if some of those crazy slippery slope arguments my ultra-conservative lawyer dad has been going on about for years aren’t as far fetched as I thought they were (I’m not talking about legalizing polygymy or polyandry). Put me in the column of cautiously concerned, a change from a few months ago when I thought settling Obergefell would be enough.

Religious freedom has always been big deal and the church has been involved with supporting efforts to increase those freedoms wherever there are windows. My dad’s friend Cole Durham has been a huge part of those efforts–and for all religious people, not just Christians. The church has been trying to build a cooperative community of government leaders, religious leaders and scholars for years and years–it’s hardly been exclusive to Mormons or even Americans. I found Jana’s piece to be surprisingly disingenuous–like hashing through talking points–instead of presenting a well-reasoned argument on this issue.

If that is your claim, then I don’t think Bob Jones supports you. The Bob Jones decision says, basically, that tax exempt status is available to organizations that qualify as charitable, and that to qualify an organization must serve a public purpose and must not be acting contrary to public policy. An institution like Bob Jones University that maintains some racially discriminatory policies is disqualified on the latter ground, and the free exercise clause (more vigorous then than now) does not alter this conclusion. This reasoning suggests that the IRS not only might but should deny tax exempt status to such organizations. And if discrimination based on sexual orientation is comparable to racial discrimination, . . . well, the conclusion is pretty obvious.

So, what do you see in Bob Jones that supports your claim that the IRS couldn’t deny tax exempt status to an institution with policies that discriminate based on sexual orientation? (Read “couldn’t” as italicized.) Your argument, as I understand it, as that in practice that IRS has used this authority sparingly. Granted. But you want to go from this observation to the conclusion that the IRS is somehow legally prevented (italicized again) from acting more affirmatively or aggressively. I don’t see how you get there. If there’s something in Bob Jones that supports this leap, I’d be grateful if you’d point it out.

Wilfried: I agree. Respectfully, however, in my opinionn this is exactly what you did in your comment. Indeed, you literally suggested that we replace the words that Gene did use with words that he did not use. Furthermore, the words you suggested that we put in his mouth were considerably “darker” than the words he did in fact use.

Also, comparing one’s interlocutors to the Inquisition while calling for a lowering of the rhetorical stakes is flat out bizarre.

There is significant insidious latent racism in the U.S., which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be dissipating unlike the traditionally-held contempt for and discrimination against gays in U.S. culture. Given the power structures favoring white males (a significant minority of whom are gay) and social trends, discrimination against gays in any form is on its way out. I think Mormons would be hard pressed to prove that it is a core tenet of the Mormon religion to discriminate against gays – and any neutral law of general applicability would defeat this argument in anything but religious employment (i.e., the Hosanna Tabor and Amos cases).

“If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

Nate (41), I agree that defenders of “traditional positions on marriage and sexuality” may have positive reasons to act, but somewhere it must always imply disapproval of marriage equality; hence, again in world perspective, the perception of their inability to “accept as equals people who are different from them.” The church’s racist past reinforces that perception. I did not mean to say that defenders of traditional marriage always regard “homosexuals as subhuman” or that they have “odious beliefs,” as you wrote. It does not help the conversation to reformulate viewpoints in much darker terms. But I recognize my sentence was compact, a swift reaction to Schaerr’s grenades, and prone to interpretation.

Nathaniel (44), it’s so easy to proclaim that what a church member wrote is “a powerful indictment of our church leaders.” It’s a well-known tactic in the history of strict religions. Especially effective if based on one sentence. The Inquisition was a master at it. Countries with blasphemy laws continue the tradition. Jeff (42) is already happy to keep the sentence as “compelling evidence.” Time to relax, brethern?

But you’re absolutely right: if that’s all there were, the political winds could change in five or ten years (or sometime).

That’s not all there is, though: the whole law and context surrounding the public policy doctrine militate against its application to schools that discriminate against those who are in same-sex marriages. I don’t want to take this entirely on a tangent, but Bob Jones was preceded by 13 years of the IRS enforcing the public policy rule against private schools that discriminated against African-American students (essentially providing a mechanism to avoid desegregation). The history, law, and politics surrounding that decision (including the long history of segregated schools) don’t apply here.

When the IRS revokes a racially-discriminatory school’s exemption, it has a long history, and it has been blessed by the Supreme Court. There are only three times that the IRS has denied an exemption (and it has never revoked an exemption) for public policy reasons that weren’t a school’s racial discrimination. Twice had to do with polygamy, and the IRS went to great lengths to explain that there had been over 100 years of federal policy against polygamy. The third was a group advocating decriminatlizing sex between minors and adults; I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a hard denial to make. (And again, they were denials, not revocations.)

Finally, even a small church that had its exemption revoked would lead to tremendous amounts of litigation; I have no doubt the Beckett Fund or the ADF would represent the church pro bono. In the context of its serious underfunding, and in light of the fact that such a revocation would provide the federal government with very little additional revenue, the cost-benefit analysis weighs strongly against doing it, even if the IRS had ideologues who were dying to revoke some school’s exemption.

Yes, it is my opinion that people who reject same-sex marriage “because they adhere to traditional positions on marriage and sexuality,” are doing so “because they cannot accept as equals people who are different from them.” If they accepted them as equals, they would grant them the same privileges as they enjoy themselves.

I hope that clarifies the context.