Cole / Nicole LeFavour

TOP TEN Reasons Idaho Does Not Need a Religious Freedom Exemption to Add the Words

TOP TEN REASONS Idaho does not need to create a religious exemption in order to add the words and include gay and transgender people in our existing laws which protect people’s liberty to hold a job, rent housing, receive an education and be served by the businesses and organizations in their communities:

10. Idaho already has robust religious freedom exemptions in its constitution and in the idaho Human Rights Act itself which specifically protects people from discrimination based on their religion.

9. Idaho’s Constitution does place limits on religious liberty saying that a person can not use religion or religious liberty as a reason to justify “pernicious practices” or do harm to others.

8. Idaho’s Human Rights Act is Idaho’s law which bans discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age and disability. To ban discrimination against gay and transgender people Idaho lawmakers simply need to add four words “sexual orientation, gender identity” to this existing law.

7. For decades, Idaho’s human rights act has balanced civil rights with religious liberty. It requires the Human Rights Commission to investigate and mediate in order to protect both individuals and businesses in cases of alleged discrimination.

6. Even today some Americans hold religious beliefs based on the Bible’s ideas about slavery and interracial marriage. Yet when race was included in Idaho’s human rights act, religious freedom exemptions were not created to allow people who held these religious beliefs to continue to discriminate by depriving black Americans of their freedoms or by refusing to provide wedding-related services to interracial couples.

5. Many religions deny women the right to own property, marry freely, or exercise other basic civil liberties. Yet when sex was included in Idaho’s civil rights and human rights laws, religious exemptions were not created to allow people to continue to deprive women of their basic freedoms or prohibit them from accessing goods, services or other public accommodations.

4. The first sentence of the Idaho Constitution addresses pubic accommodation and lists acquiring property among our inalienable rights as individuals. A religious exemption permitting people to refuse to provide gay people with wedding related goods and services would violate Idaho’s constitution.

3. If Idaho created an exemption allowing religious people to continue to discriminate against gay and transgender people this would unconstitutionally prioritize in law one religious belief over the beliefs of other religions — those which instead place priority on the golden rule and believe that gay people are made in the image of god and are deserving of full liberties and inclusion under existing law.

2. To only party include gay and transgender people in Idaho’s human rights act sends the message that gay and transgender people are not fully human or not worthy of neighborly love, respect, dignity or service by businesses in their own communities. It sets gay people and religious people apart, creating a distinction which could perpetuate acts of violence as well as continued despair and suicide by gay and transgender youth.

1. If you are Christian, ask yourself, “What would Jesus do?” Would Jesus say you should refuse to bake the wedding cake for your neighbors? Where do we define what celebrating or participation in a wedding is? Is that just making a wedding bouquet and taking photographs or is it renting the wedding gown, the tuxedo or the hall? Selling the paper napkins? Growing the flowers for the bouquets? Fixing the newlywed’s broken car? Renting them their hotel room on their honeymoon? Renting an apartment to their family? Schooling their children? Serving them an anniversary dinner? Allowing them to live in your retirement community? Accommodating the funeral when one of them passes away?