No need to apologize, and it absolutely is correct.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
It’s a little surprising that someone, who claims to know the First Amendment, doesn’t know the opening line! More surprising is your inability to grasp the basic premise of my argument: that our rights come from God, not the Bill of Rights, (it is explicitly stated in our country’s founding document: the Declaration of Independence) and that it is the role of government to defend those rights — all of them, and not rank order them.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights
But, I’ll address your tangential point since I injected the issue in my post. “Black heartedness” notwithstanding, we cannot ask our government to take away one right in order to promote another, nor can we ask a person to deny their faith merely because they are engaged in commerce. (the most bassackwards idea I’ve ever heard) Otherwise we live not in a Republic but an Autarchy.
“Congress is authorized to regulate commerce, and anti-exclusion laws are a legitimate use of that authority.”
Congress has passed no such law. Furthermore it would not be a legitimate use of their authority which you educe from a much abused clause empowering Congress to regulate international and interstate commerce — not local transactions between individuals. So-called anti-exclusion laws are passed by localities and although I agree with them in spirit, they’ve proven to be problematic in practice. Though anti-discrimination laws that protect classes such as race and gender are consistent with the Constitution, as amended, they may yet violate the law of the land when expanded to include age or sexual orientation.
“But they can’t refuse to serve them, just for being gay. That’s illegal.”
That’s true, at least in Colorado, but it’s also not the case. First, they NEVER refused to serve the client, who had been a customer for years, they only refused a specific request to create a custom work — they even tried to help their customer find another bakery. So it seemed to me that the activist Colorado courts exceeded both the letter and spirit of their own law. Second, such laws are probably unConstitutional as written and won’t survive review by the SCOTUS although they don’t have a perfect track record. (Dred Scott) Third, since our Rights do not come from Government, Governments lack the authority to alter or deny them; that’s what unalienable means.
Governments ought to intervene whenever one person’s “pursuit of happiness” hampers another’s life, liberty, or property. (The baker’s inaction did none of these things) When government oversteps these bounds we are obliged to follow our conscience even in violation of such laws. This is how Segregation died, this is how Prohibition died, how Taxation without Representation died.
