Why I get a nagging feeling every time I hear the phrase ‘religious liberty’

By Alvin McEwen

Those who are my friends know that I am a serious fan of the 1970s detective drama Columbo. The thing I really loved about this show was the fact of how the character of police detective Columbo never considered a murder case completely simple. He never bought into the idea of an “open-and-shut” case if he had a nagging feeling, no matter how insignificant it was.

That nagging feeling is what I get when I hear about marriage clerks, hotel owners, Catholic adoption agencies, and recently — cake bakers who refuse to serve gay couples.

No doubt you have heard about them and will probably hear a lot more as religious right groups trying to hinder marriage equality will canonize these folks as “saints and martyrs” besieged by so-called radical gay activists supposedly trying to force them choose between their livelihood and religious freedom.

In fact they have a term for this sort of thing. They call it “religious liberty.”

There is a certain simplicity to these cases which garners them a degree of support. Some of these folks (excluding Catholic charities who have no right to taxpayer money to discriminate and marriage clerks who should put the needs of constituents over their own desires) seems to have a right to serve whomever they wish. And one could even make the case that they are in fact forced to choose between their livelihoods and their “religious liberty.”

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