Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, decorating a cake at his shop in Lakewood, Colo. Credit Nick Cote for The New York Times I opened the door of a business called True’s. It was a pharmacy run by a conservative Republican, a man who eventually served as the speaker of the House in the Maine State Legislature. It occurred to me, as I walked in, that the store might well refuse to fill my prescription, given my condition. And I wondered whether the pharmacy’s actions would be legal if, indeed, the pharmacist argued that helping a person like me went against his beliefs. After all, there’s a long history of people using religious liberty as reason to justify their refusal to provide a public service offered by their business. In 1968, the owner of a barbecue restaurant — Piggie Park, in South Carolina — held that his religious beliefs gave him the right to withhold service from African-Americans. The owner, Maurice Bessinger, argued that the Civil Rights Act violated his freedom of religion, because “his religious beliefs compel him to oppose any integration of the races whatever.” More recently, a pediatrician rejected Krista and Jamie Contreras’s child as a patient in Roseville, Mich., in 2014. The doctor, saying she had given the matter “much prayer,” decided that she couldn’t provide health care to their baby because they are lesbians. On Tuesday, in a case supported by the Trump administration and a group called Alliance Defending Freedom, a broad right to discriminate on the basis of faith will be argued before the Supreme Court. If you’ve never heard of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the name alone is probably a tip off that freedom is the last thing it’s concerned with defending.
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March 2018
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