States Are Also Destroyers of Rights

With all of the abuses of the federal government taking center stage, we should not forget that state governments are also destroyers of rights. An LRC reader writes:

It’s not often that any kind of news comes out of New Mexico at all, much less a story that will be of concern to both libertarians and orthodox Christians. But our “Human Rights Commission,” apparently aspiring to join the Canadian government, has recently penalized an evangelical Christian photographer here in Albuquerque for refusing to photograph a same-sex “commitment ceremony” on the ground that such refusal is illegal discrimination. Of course, the religious freedoms of the photographer were of no significance. (I believe that comes under the provision of the Constitution which says that you have a right to free exercise of religion as long as you keep it to yourself and don’t let it affect anything you do.)

The story is here.

The issue here, of course, is not gay rights, but freedom of association and freedom of contract. The die was cast with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which turned “discrimination” into a dirty word.

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5:04 pm on April 14, 2008