{"id":1748851,"date":"2022-11-23T06:06:07","date_gmt":"2022-11-23T11:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1748851"},"modified":"2022-11-23T07:03:05","modified_gmt":"2022-11-23T12:03:05","slug":"the-respect-for-marriage-act-is-an-exercise-in-tyranny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-respect-for-marriage-act-is-an-exercise-in-tyranny\/","title":{"rendered":"The Respect For Marriage Act Is An Exercise In Tyranny"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-respect-for-marriage-act-is-an-exercise-in-tyranny%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1748851&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Obergefell.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>It\u2019s not hard to game out what happens if the misnamed Respect for Marriage Act passes, codifying\u00a0<em>Obergefell<\/em>\u00a0and enshrining gay marriage in federal law. Everyone, including the dozen Republican senators who voted to advance the legislation last week, knows exactly what will happen. It\u2019s not some big mystery.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>What will happen is this: Christians, Jews, Muslims, and anyone else who dares maintain that marriage is a lifelong conjugal union between one man and one woman \u2014 the definition of marriage for thousands of years until the U.S. Supreme Court descended from Mount Sinai with\u00a0<em>Obergefell v. Hodges<\/em>\u00a0inscribed on stone tablets \u2014 will be branded a bigot and driven from the public square and marketplace.<\/p>\n<p>Anyone who owns a small business related to the wedding industry \u2014 photographers, bakers, website designers, venue owners, caterers, florists \u2014 will be sued into oblivion if they refuse services to same-sex couples. Religious colleges and universities will lose their tax-exempt status. Religious institutions of every kind, if they hold to their teachings and traditions about marriage, will face an onslaught from the Department of Justice and the federal bureaucracy.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>To paraphrase George Orwell\u2019s famous line, if you want a picture of the future under the Respect for Marriage Act, imagine a boot stamping on Jack Phillips\u2019 face \u2014 forever.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The untrammeled exercise of power and the vigorous crushing of dissent is\u00a0<em>the entire purpose<\/em>\u00a0of the proposed law. There can be no other possible justification for it. Michael New, an assistant professor at the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America, recently\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailysignal.com\/2022\/11\/19\/mike-lee-urges-gop-senators-who-voted-for-respect-for-marriage-act-have-the-courage-to-protect-free-exercise-of-religion\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">told The Daily Signal<\/a>\u00a0that Catholic colleges and universities in particular might face ruinous lawsuits and loss of federal funding if the bill is signed into law.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSuppose a Catholic college refused to allow a same-sex married couple to live in college owned graduate student housing for families, they might be subject to all kinds of litigation,\u201d he said. \u201cSuch a college might lose its nonprofit status. Their students might lose eligibility for federal financial aid and their faculty might lose eligibility from research grants from government agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Well, yes.\u00a0<em>Of course<\/em>\u00a0all that would happen. Democrats and left-wing activists hear these kinds of concerns from people like New and think, \u201cGood. Let them face ruinous litigation. Let them lose funding. Ghettoize them. Crush them. Grind their institutions into dust. They deserve it, the bigots.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>All the more appalling, then, that 12 Republican senators voted to advance the bill knowing full well what it will do. One wishes the explanation is just that these lawmakers are too stupid to understand what the purpose of the proposed law really is and what its effect will obviously be, but that\u2019s wishful thinking.<\/p>\n<p>If they\u2019re going to support this bill, though, do they have to pretend that\u00a0<em>we\u2019re<\/em>\u00a0all too stupid to understand how it will work? Does Dan Sullivan, the second-worst U.S. senator from Alaska, who once\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thehill.com\/blogs\/ballot-box\/senate-races\/214317-alaska-republicans-focus-on-social-issues-in-senate-debate\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">supported a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage<\/a>\u00a0in the long-ago of 2014, really believe that the Respect for Marriage Act makes \u201cimportant advances\u201d in religious liberty?<\/p>\n<p>Does Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who 10 years ago as speaker of the statehouse\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/archive.nytimes.com\/takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com\/2014\/10\/16\/in-north-carolina-thom-tillis-is-the-last-holdout-against-gay-marriage\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">supported a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in his state<\/a>, really think the anemic amendments he and other GOP senators offered to the bill will \u201cadvance religious freedom\u201d and \u201cage well\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>All the Republicans who voted to advance the bill last week issued some version of the nonsense Sullivan and Tillis spouted. None of them believe a word of it. They just hope you buy it.<\/p>\n<p>But you don\u2019t have to. Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.heritage.org\/marriage-and-family\/commentary\/fact-checking-7-claims-defenders-democrats-same-sex-marriage-bill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">helpfully walked through these specious claims one by one<\/a>, explaining why they\u2019re wrong. No, the bill won\u2019t provide religious institutions with meaningful protections. Yes, the bill could certainly be used as a basis for the Internal Revenue Service to deny tax-exempt status to religious organizations that don\u2019t toe the line on gay marriage. Yes, it could also be used to deny grants, licenses, or contracts. No, weak language about preserving the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is not enough to prevent harm to religious liberty. And so on.<\/p>\n<p>The justification for the bill is just as outlandish and offensive as the argument that it presents no danger to religious Americans. In the wake of the\u00a0<em>Dobbs<\/em>\u00a0decision this summer, we were warned that some future Supreme Court opinion, following Justice Clarence Thomas\u2019s logic, could overturn\u00a0<em>Obergefell<\/em>\u00a0and other substantive due process rulings such as\u00a0<em>Loving v. Virginia<\/em>, which struck down state laws banning interracial marriage.<\/p>\n<p>The purpose of this claim, in case it isn\u2019t bone-crushingly obvious, is to lump opponents of gay marriage in with opponents of interracial marriage, to smear them as bigots who aren\u2019t just on the wrong side of history, but who are about to be on the receiving end of a federal government empowered to go after them.<\/p>\n<p>And if you think that can\u2019t really be how proponents of the Respect for Marriage Act think about traditional-minded Americans, go ask Jack Phillips\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/10\/06\/the-never-ending-persecution-of-jack-phillips\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">how he\u2019s faring<\/a>\u00a0after winning his Supreme Court case in 2018.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s not hard to game out what happens if the misnamed Respect for Marriage Act passes, codifying\u00a0Obergefell\u00a0and enshrining gay marriage in federal law. Everyone, including the dozen Republican senators who<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1747572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[547],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1748851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bongino-report"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1748851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1747572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1748851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1748851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1748851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}