The first thing you need to know is that most “wedding chapels” are not actually chapels. They are private businesses, sometimes run by ordained ministers who are thus licensed to perform marriage ceremonies, but just as often run by Elvis impersonators. Thus, the question of how marriage-equality laws apply to private wedding chapels is ostensibly a question of under what circumstances the government can lawfully step on a for-profit company’s blue suede shoes.
Ground zero for this debate is now Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. There, the city is
apparently requiring the Hitching Post Lakeside Chapel to officiate gay weddings. Now, it’s hard to imagine any gay couple wanting to get married at the Hitching Post Lakeside Chapel.
Their website talks about “the difference between men and women” and says “women respond to love positively because they were created that way” and “men respond to respect because that is the way they are created.”
Yeah. And the private “chapel” reportedly gives its newlyweds a conservative Christian CD with hetero-reinforcing marriage sermons. Then again, given the über-butch Paul Bunyan log-cabin façade, if some gay men mistook the Hitching Post Lakeside Chapel for a for a Western bar, that would be understandable.
Anyway, after a court effectively made marriage equality the law of the land in Idaho a week ago, it appears some misguided gay couple wandered into the Hitching Post Lakeside Chapel. The owners, Evelyn and Donald Knapp, apparently declined to marry the couple and
instead filed a federal lawsuit to stop the city of Coeur d’Alene from enforcing its non-discrimination law. Yup, Evelyn and Donald Knapp are “ordained Christian ministers” suing for the right to discriminate.
State and federal laws generally exempt religious institutions from having to perform gay marriages. Yet the Hitching Post Lakeside Chapel is not a church or a synagogue or a mosque but a private business—apparently one in the newly created categorical mold of Hobby Lobby, a “for-profit religious corporation.” If you wondered what the slippery slope of the
Hobby Lobby decision might entail, here’s a good look. In the
Hobby Lobby ruling,
Justice Alito wrote that the decision does not “provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice.” We’ll see about that. The faith-based legal advocacy group defending the Hitching Post Lakeside Chapel will undoubtedly lean on
Hobby Lobby to make its case.
Either way, it’s worth noting that the Hitching Post Lakeside Chapel is at this point being required to officiate same-sex weddings not because of any federal or state law, but because of local non-discrimination laws passed in Coeur d’Alene. So much for all those conservatives who want the federal government to butt out and let local jurisdictions rule. I guess that’s only when they agree with the local jurisdictions.
By the same token, conservatives seem to only support government forcing people to do things when it comes to
requiring that doctors read out loud misleading information written by abortion opponents to any women patients contemplating terminating a pregnancy. That kind of government coercion of speech and action seems a-OK to the conservative liberty crowd. But requiring a private business to provide equal accommodation to all Americans, including the gay ones? Tyranny!
