“Gay rights and religious liberties” at Bloggingheads.tvGetReligion.org blogger Mollie Ziegler Hemingway and Religion Dispatches blogger Sarah Posner discuss “gay rights vs. religious liberties” at Bloggingheads.tv. Ziegler Hemingway: [The Elane Photography and Ocean Grove cases] show[] that there are growing conflicts between religious liberties and gay rights in general. Posner: Well, I think in both those cases there were . . . conservative Christian legal groups got involved in those so it’s not necessarily a conflict between gay marriage and religious liberty, but maybe more of a political conflict with organizations with a political agenda who want to portray gay marriage in a certain way. Ziegler Hemingway: I’m not quite sure what you mean by that. Posner: Well, you know, the Alliance Defense Fund was very involved in the litigation in both of those cases you cite . . . so you could make an argument that there’s not an actual collision between the rights of these gay and lesbian couples and religion; it’s been trumped up by these legal groups who want to make a political issue out of it. Ziegler Hemingway: Well, I think–obviously there’s a reason why groups like the ADF or the ACLU choose particular cases; they choose them because they think they’re particularly representative or winnable and so, of course, there are other issues going on, and those cases do not make some of the activism on the other side look very friendly or tolerant . . . Is there going to be room in the public square for people who think that homosexuality is wrong or that same-sex marriage is wrong. Is that the goal of some gay activists–to completely drive these people from the public square . . . Full dialogue below: Have Democrats abandoned faith outreach? (09:51) |