On his radio broadcast yesterday, Glenn Beck weighed in on the controversy surrounding Indiana’s new law which grants business owners the right to discriminate in the name of “religious freedom,” by defending the law … so long as the business owner practicing the discrimination is actually religious.
Under Beck’s scenario, businesses are not allowed to discriminate against anybody unless the owners can adequately prove to the government that they are really living their faith and not just engaging in rank bigotry.
“This is the key here,” Beck said. “You actually have to be religious. You can’t just be somebody like ‘I hate them gays so I’m not going to do it.’ No, tell me a little bit about your religion.”
Beck said that members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), for instance, which recently voted to allow its pastors to preside over same-sex marriages, wouldn’t be allowed to deny their services to a gay couple.
“Sorry dude, you’re making a wedding cake because you say you belong to this church [and] they happen to agree with it,” Beck said.
“Show me about how you’re living your life in your church,” he said. “If you’re living your faith, well then I can’t say anything about it since its your religious right. And gay people have to get over it. And anybody else who might be bigoted and you own a bakery — I don’t want to sell anyone them cookies — well, dude, you have to and that’s just the way it is. You need to get over it”:
Suppose for a moment that Beck’s standard was actually adopted and government officials were tasked with determining whether individual business owners are “living their faith” enough to qualify for this exemption and then just try to imagine the screams of outrage that would ring out from Beck and other Religious Right activists once the state started denying such exemptions because it had determined that the people in question just weren’t religious enough.
