Rabbi (to be) Ari Naveh
recently shared how he balances the line between being a gay rabbi—and
a rabbi who is gay
. Here he takes his learning, as well as his years of work with the
RAC
, and puts it in practice, examining why the LGBT and Jewish community should be paying attention to two Supreme Court cases.
An arts & crafts supply chain from Oklahoma is paving the way for legalized discrimination. Think I’m being dramatic? I assure you, I’m not.
A few months ago, the Supreme Court decided to hear two cases:
Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores
and Conestoga Wagon Specialties v. Sebelius. Both of these cases challenge the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that businesses must include contraception in their healthcare plans. In both cases, the owners of the two corporations claim that the contraception mandate violates their first amendment right of freedom to exercise their religion. These owners claim that the religious rights of their corporations are being infringed upon—in other words, since the owners of Hobby Lobby are Christian, Hobby Lobby itself is Christian as well. If the idea of a non-sentient corporation having its own religious beliefs sounds a bit strange to you, that’s because it is.
Four years ago, in an unfortunate landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that corporations should be granted full permission to exercise their first amendment right to free speech in the context of direct donations to all manner of political campaigns. Put simply, the Court stated that corporations are people. The repercussions of this case on the already fraught status of monetary influence on political campaigns were, in a word, ginormous. But we are not here to discuss the unnervingly complicated issues of campaign finance law; I’ll save that for another blog post that you can read when you’ve got hopeless insomnia and that Ambien just isn’t working for you.
Ari on the steps of the Supreme Court, marching for equality.
No, this is about how a Supreme Court case about campaign financing, and another about birth control, will affect LGBTQ Americans in serious, and terrifying ways—and why the Jewish community needs to pay attention. This is about what keeps me up late at night, worrying about the safety of LGBTQ Americans, and what my Jewish community can do to support equality.
Now, you may be asking yourself: What does this mean for the LGBTQ community—and the Jewish community? Aside from the overwhelmingly negative effects this case could have millions of women in the United States and their access to contraception—access to which Jewish tradition pretty much categorically supports if the Court sides with Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wagon Specialties, discrimination against the LGBTQ community in all sorts of forms will now have the legal right to be couched in the extraordinarily misleading language of “freedom of religious expression.”
You may recall the case of the Oregon bakery whose owners refused to bake a cake for a gay couple about to get married in nearby Washington State. Their refusal was on religious grounds, as they claimed that gay marriage stomped all over their belief in “traditional” marriage. The case went to a state Labor Board, who ruled against the bakery, claiming that it was in blatant discrimination of the rights of the couple.
However, if the Supreme Court rules for Hobby Lobby, that bakery would be completely within its rights as a Christian—that’s the bakery, not the owners—to refuse service to all sorts of people with whom it may disagree on religious grounds: gay couples, non-married couples, whatever. So fine, you may say: if a business wants to actively refuse service to any number of prospective clients, thus, you know, hurting its own profits, then zey gezunt, that’s their own silly problem. However, It gets worse: a “religious” company/factory/school/business could claim that it is well within its freedom of religious expression to not hire, fire, refuse to promote, taunt openly, or refuse any benefits to any and all LGBT employees, prospective employees or their spouses. A “religious” apartment complex could handily refuse to rent to someone living with HIV/AIDS, a same-sex couple, or anyone within the LGBT community; “religious” pharmacies could refuse to stock and sell contraceptives, HIV medication, condoms, or any sort of item that may be “against their religious beliefs.”
Our community has been working too hard and long to ensure that such blatant discrimination is legislated into oblivion where it belongs. With one swift bang of the gavel, the Supreme Court could terminate any real prospect of that legislation ever seeing the light of day, thus almost guaranteeing discrimination in the workplace, in medical care, in housing, and virtually everywhere else in this great nation, all for the sake of “religious freedom.”
Maintaining the freedom to practice one’s religion is no doubt vital, and – it should go without saying– already guaranteed to us in the Constitution. As a burgeoning Jewish professional, I know full well the real dangers of denying somebody’s legitimate right to practice their faith, and the even worse dangers when someone else believes their right to ‘practice their religion’ trumps your right as a citizen. However, what Hobby Lobby and the Conestoga Wagon Specialties stores are attempting to portray is not religious discrimination, it is homophobia, misogyny and racism masked in religious doublespeak, and showing a real chance of being codified into law.
