As a Christian, Elaine Huguenin is against efforts to legitimize same-sex “marriage.”

When an Albuquerque photographer was asked via e-mail in September 2006 to photograph a “commitment ceremony” for two women, the photographer, Elaine Huguenin declined. That was the end of the matter, she thought, said the National Catholic Register.
But Huguenin didn’t take into account New Mexico’s anti-discrimination laws. Instead of hiring another photographer, one of the lesbians filed a civil complaint against Huguenin’s company.

You knew this was coming, right?

Now, in one of the first cases of its kind in the state, a three-member tribunal of New Mexico’s Human Rights Commission is considering the complaint brought forward by New Mexico’s Human Rights Bureau, operated by the Labor Relations Division of the state’s Department of Workforce Solutions.

Something about these Orwellian Human Rights Commissions scare the bejezus out of me. I think that it’s likely that more rights will be taken away by faceless “commissions” than by overbearing Presidents or Supreme Court Justices in the future of this country. The right to make up our own mind based on your own conscience will become a fine-able offense in the future.

“It warps the whole concept of discrimination to an absurd extreme,” said Jordan Lorence, senior council for the Alliance Defense Fund, the Phoenix-based organization which has come to Huguenin’s defense.

Lorence cited a local Knights of Columbus council in British Columbia, which was fined $2,000 by the province’s Human Rights Tribunal in 2005 for refusing to rent their hall for a same-sex “wedding” reception.

In another case, a Methodist facility in Ocean Grove, N.J., faces a tax bill of $20,000 after its state tax-exempt status was revoked for refusing to host a homosexual commitment ceremony.

And in late February, the threat of a discrimination lawsuit sadly bullied a Catholic hospital in California to agree to perform breast augmentation surgery on a transsexual man.

Said Lorence, “If you give government the right to punish people for having a different opinion than the prevailing secular orthodoxy, you’re saying whoever controls government can suppress dissent. I think we embrace that idea at our peril.”