Some days ago I wrote out a blog post in manuscript; not completely, but enough to get me going once I got to my computer. Alas, I have no idea where that piece of paper is. It’s not in all the usual places. I could look in unusual places, but that seems like work, more work than starting from scratch.

So, having finished my stock chart reading for the evening, and not yet ready to exit The Dungeon and read, I’ll try to recreate this.

The impetus for this post is the recent passage of religious freedom bills (RFRA) in Indiana and Arkansas, as described in this post. I won’t repeat what I said there. At least I don’t think I will. And, I’m fairly sure I won’t be able to finish my thoughts in just one post of reasonable length for a blog, maybe not in two. So I hope readers of this post will indulge me my wordiness, and come back for all doses of this. And my full argument won’t be clear until the very end. If you stop before that you may get the wrong impression of what I’m saying.

I got into a couple of Facebook debates on the state RFRAs. Nothing earth shattering. Mainly I said I hadn’t read the bills/acts in question, didn’t know what they said, but didn’t know why they were needed. The general interpretation of the acts by one side was that they gave license for people to discriminate against the homosexual community based on their own religious views. The interpretation of the other side seemed to be that the right of conscious based on religious views needed to be preserved, and government actions were leaning towards doing away with religious conscious. I hope that’s a reasonable summary, and not too repetitive of my former post.

Trying to think of this from a larger viewpoint than just the homosexual community, it seems what you have here is a clash of rights: one group’s right to be treated justly, and another group’s right to act on their conscious, regardless of the reason why they have that position.  Let’s say this was a case of a landlord not wanting to rent to a black person because his religion (or political conscious) forbids him to. The USA has determined that in such a clash of rights, the civil rights of the black person outweigh the right of conscious of a landlord, and he/she can’t behave that way. He/she cannot base rental decisions on race.

What about business-to-consumer services based on sexual orientation?  This is a harder area to define, in my mind. With regard to race, a person is whatever race they were born with. It wasn’t their choice. In the case of sexual orientation, it seems to me that the jury is still out on whether it’s a choice or an in-born trait. Or perhaps it’s always a choice or always an inborn trait. I suspect it is an inborn trait in many cases, and a choice in many as well. If it’s a choice, do the civil rights or the homosexual person (by which I mean both males and females who practice same-sex relations) trump the right-of-conscious of the straight person? Or are the rights about equal, and hence neither side should require any special mention in the law as being a protected class.

These are difficult issues in my mind. I realize people who read this might disagree—on either side. It might be clear cut to some that it’s always a choice or always an inborn trait. Someone might even say it doesn’t make a difference whether it’s a choice or inborn. It is how it is, and discrimination vs. conscious must be settled one way of the other.

Without settling the question concerning the clash of rights as it relates to homosexuals, I want to consider the broader picture of other areas of conscious. Alas, as I thought, I’m out of space in this blog post. Look for another post in a day or two—at least I’ll try to get back to this that quickly.