Douglas Laycock Quotes
It is a risky step to interfere with the most intimate details of other people's lives while loudly claiming liberty for yourself.
The then current example was with same sex marriage. Some people who claimed that their religion declared same sex marriage as a sin and prohibited their aiding and abetting that activity. As a result, they claimed that their right of religious freedom allowed a county clerk to refuse to issue the marriage license or a hotel to refuse to allow a gay couple to rent their facility for a wedding, or a retail store to refuse to sell the couple bedding.
Douglas Laycock, Legal Scholar & Vice President of the American Law Institute, Expert on Religious Freedom & The Law, Advice to those who claimed the right to discriminate against others if their religious beliefs so dictate, Quoted in Emily Bazelon, "The God Clause", The New York Times Magazine, July 12, 2015
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The then current example was with same sex marriage. Some people who claimed that their religion declared same sex marriage as a sin and prohibited their aiding and abetting that activity. As a result, they claimed that their right of religious freedom allowed a county clerk to refuse to issue the marriage license or a hotel to refuse to allow a gay couple to rent their facility for a wedding, or a retail store to refuse to sell the couple bedding.
Israel, like the UK, does not have a constitution or bill of rights per se, and laws passed by the Knesset serve the role of enumerating rights.
Both the United States and Canada had laws regulating the sexual behavior of citizens in the privacy of their own homes. It was not just homosexuality that the state attempted to control. Even the specific positions and methods of heterosexual intercourse were controlled by some states. Oral sex, certain positions of intercourse and other “details” could put a person in jail. Canada, a parliamentary nation, changed this by legislation. In the United States, it was the Supreme Court decisions protecting privacy that invalidated these old sexual role restrictions and prescriptions. For example, just 4 years before this quotation was made, 1963, the state of Connecticut was ordered (Griswald v. Connecticut) to release a pharmacist for the “crime” of filling a doctor’s prescription for condoms for a married couple where the wife would likely die if she became pregnant and carried the baby to term.
Her sister, Mary, the previous Queen, had over 200 Englishmen burned at the stake for their Protestant beliefs. Elisabeth wanted no part of the government trying to determine or regulate the religious beliefs of Englishmen.
Douglas Laycock is Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, and a leading scholar in the areas of religious liberty and the law of remedies. He also currently serves as the 2nd Vice President of the American Law Institute and is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
