Gen-Con Vs. Religious Freedom

You may not know who or what a “Gen-Con” is. That is okay, I hardly do either.

What I do know of Gen-Con is from friends of mine that attend this event annually. It was co-founded by one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons. It has an event annually held, apparently in Indiana, and last years attendance was north of 50,000 people for the weekend of the event. From a little wikipedia research I can see that they’ve had some legal trouble with Lucasfilms and a spat with the Christian Children’s fund all within the last decade.

Given those two things I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising to see that they’re coming out against a state enacting a Religious Freedom act. How could they, as an organization, possibly stand for a State protecting religious freedoms? Oh, wait… Does Religious Freedom really mean what they think it means?

The answer to that is: No, it doesn’t. In fact many states (30, as of 2013) have Religious Freedom in some form either in their constitution, as an amendment to their constitution or an Act of some kind. One of those is Washington, which if you remember sued a woman for refusing to provide flowers to a Gay couple’s wedding… So just because your state has something regarding Religious Freedom of some kind doesn’t necessarily mean you can deny service to someone based on your religious beliefs or “discriminate” against them, as Gen Con fears.

In fact it’s been stated that the Indiana provision that is near passing very closely mirrors already existing Federal Law, the only difference being that it relates to State Laws. I think we can all agree that the Federal Religious Freedom Restoraction Act (RFRA) is in no way discriminatory against anyone in the LGBT community, in fact it and other RFRAs do very little to protect people who follow Christ from those in the LGBT community (as witnessed in Washington). The Federal Law has failed to protect bakers in Oregon and Colorado, neither of which have State laws.

So does Indiana passing a Religious Freedom act really mean anything to Gen Con or its attendees? No, it absolutely doesn’t. This is all just an impressive temper tantrum so that they can claim they left Indiana because of this… something that I hear they’ve been wanting/planning to do for a couple of years anyway. So grab some popcorn and enjoy watching them flail around because Indiana is passing a law they don’t like and won’t effect them at all.