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another case, a Methodist facility in Ocean Grove, N.J., faces a tax bill of $20,000 after its state tax-exempt status was revoked for refusing to host a homosexual commitment ceremony.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.”
March 12, 2008 at 4:33 pm
It does seem like we keep inching to closer to 1984. Certainly in terms of thought control – er, I mean sharing goodthought.
March 12, 2008 at 5:13 pm
YOu best watch your phraseology or we might be forced to report you to the thought police.
March 14, 2008 at 11:13 am
It seems to me that the same people who are insisting that we recognize their rights, their lifestyle, and their right to sin are the SAME people who would trample our rights, our lifestyle (!), and our right to live according to our faith. What gets me is the constant insistent that we not only recognize them but that we capitulate to their way of thinking. Do they not see the irony in that way of thinking?
BTW: My name is Melissa and I only posted anonymous because I couldn’t figure out they other ways.