[[I thought that the only religious exclusion that any business or organization could carve out was in jobs directly related to religious practice or teaching, i.e. priests and teachers.]]
Be warned. That exemption is weak tea indeed. A teacher at a Christian school can hardly feel free to teach or preach the Bible when surrounded by homosexuals in supposedly non-religious positions. One obnoxious gay janitor could split apart a entire church.
Indeed. According to the NR author, David French:
The Court's reasoning was absurd, rejecting the schools' expressive association argument in part because the school was "free" (for now, anyway) to explain that hiring Barrett was merely "involuntary compliance with civil law." By that standard, expressive association becomes meaningless. After all, if a court can jam Christian employers with employees who don't share their values - and then contend that the employers' rights are protected if they're still free to complain about it - then the floodgates are open. Moreover, it's disturbing to see a court substitute its own judgment for a Christian organization's determination of what constitutes a "serious" burden on its religious expression. Even worse, the court held that even if the school could establish a serious burden on its expression, the state had a "compelling governmental interest" in eliminating discrimination, effectively crushing the school's First Amendment rights.Yet the right of expressive association depends on an understanding that people are expression. The best ambassadors for any given point of view are the people who actually believe what they're saying and believe in the organization's mission and purpose. This is all constitutional common sense, of course. But this case has nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with the intolerance of the sexual revolutionaries. Read More