Freedom to faith?

The NYRB often runs long articles about the arcane goings in their Supreme Court, about how, for example, a few words in the constitution, written hundreds of years ago with something completely different in mind, can make or break Obamacare.

There was another example, a couple of months ago (May 7th 2015), about the contest between the right to be gay and the right to exercise one's faith. At about the same when there was some noisy debate in this country, I think in the prot. bit of Northern Ireland, about whether a cake maker was entitled to refuse to make a gay cake.

The problem seems to be that while there is plenty of sympathy out there for the cake makers, allowing religious exemptions from the law of the land is fraught with difficulty. What counts as a religion? Who counts as a religious person? What about middle aged hairies who worship sun, moon & marijuana out in the sierras of the Southwest? Can they claim exemption from the (widely thought to be bad) rules about narcotics on grounds of free exercise of their religion? A free exercise which, in this particular example, unlike the cake example, does not impact anyone else's freedoms.

Are States allowed to enact laws protecting religious rights which trump Federal laws? Laws known as religious freedom restoration acts (RFPAs). Can laws talk about religion at all when the US constitution expressly forbids the establishment of religion? The NYRB devotes two pages, including two small pictures, to these ticklish issues. Their bottom line seems to be that endless litigation about RFPAs has the malign effect of transferring the matter from the elected legislatures where it belongs to the lawyers and law courts. A problem of lawyer creep which we in England know all about too.

While I think, as I think Simon Jenkins may have said at the time, that the law probably has to be the way it is, to enshrine gay rights, but it would be better all round everybody showed a bit of forbearance and if gays did not push their luck, to boldly, not to say loudly, push their way into cake shops where they were not wanted. I felt rather the same about the ladies who made a great fuss thirty years about not being allowed to use the front bar of the then famous El Vino's in Fleet Street - sadly now no longer quite the place it once was, now that the journos have moved off to the East End and, in any event, are probably no longer quite the same boozers that they used to be.

PS: it is a bit odd about religion and the constitution, in fact if not in law, given that we here in the UK have an established religion which no-one much bothers about while they in the US don't have an established religion but do bother a lot more than we do about religion.