Here’s the sticky widget the Knapps created for themselves. By advertising a for-profit business that essentially says they’ll marry any two adults of opposite sexes, apparently with no counseling and no refusals based on any conflict which scriptural fidelity, they are discriminating based on sex.
Most ministers I know insist on a counseling visit with the engaged where they discuss the scriptural meaning of the vows and assess whether the couple should go through with the wedding based on their responses and apparent emotional maturity. Some even insist you pass a workshop before they will agree to do the nuptials.
It will be more difficult for such ministers, with a track record of declining to do heterosexual weddings they felt were unwise or unprepared for marriage, to be trapped by this ordinance.
However, these drive-by wedding chapels, like the ones in Las Vegas, are in a different boat because they don’t screen the couple for biblical readiness before agreeing to perform the vows.
In a sense, their lack of discrimination to hetero weddings is why they are now seen as clearly discriminating to homosexual weddings.
Not that I agree at all with this government bullying but I think there is an important distinction to be made between people like the Knapps and people who are church ministers who take performing vows seriously enough to have said no a few times in the past when the couple wasn’t a good match or required additional screening based on biblical principles.
> they are discriminating based on sex.
WRONG!!!
They are discriminating based on BEHAVIOR!
Homosexuals are perverse, sick, deranged, delusional, and mentally ill.
They are incompetent to marry, even the opposite sex, let alone eachother.
They need treatment.
They are adhering to their own religious views. The First Ammendment doesn’t narrowly define what our religious views must be. It doesn’t preclude pastors from making a distinction between homosexual behavior and other human failings. It doesn’t require them to equate homosexual acts with immaturity.
It wasn’t so very long ago that people generally understood that the First Ammendment secures their right to not participate in homosexual acts against their religious convictions.
I don’t think that matters at all. The 1st Amendment is an individual guarantee, to exercise your religion how you please. The government can’t say “well, you didn’t exercise this little bit of the Bible, so you forfeited your guarantee”. That in itself would be a violation, because the government would be telling you how you must exercise.
I could even make an argument on theological grounds that such counseling is not required. The Bible advises people to marry if they can’t resist lust. Lust leads to hell. Marrying people to help them avoid hellfire is therefore an imminent priority, even if the people don’t want the counseling. (Not that I believe that is a valid argument, but it’s not for the government to judge)