The beauty about work is that you can always leave if you don’t like what you’re being asked to do. Being asked to lift heavy stuff and you don’t want to? Find a job where you don’t have to. Serving pork is against your religion? Work at a vegan restaurant. Don’t like dogs? Don’t work at an animal hospital. Feel squeamish about blood? Don’t work at a hospital.

It really is that simple.

The First Amendment challenge is a sideshow; this case will be all about teeing up Obergefell for the conservative bloc's pot shots, if not complete overturning. The larger cultural theme, though, is to underscore who's in charge by flaunting the "in" group's imperviousness to normal legal rules: like Trump, the January 6 offenders, Justices Thomas and Alito themselves, et al., Kim Davis will be shown to be above the law.

> Just absurd.

What's worse - Kim Davis's personal life doesn't read like someone who "respects traditional marriage". From wikipedia:

> Davis has been married four times to three husbands. The first three marriages ended in divorce in 1994, 2006, and 2008. Davis has two daughters from her first marriage and twins, a son and another daughter, who were born five months after her divorce from her first husband. Her third husband is the biological father of the twins, the children being conceived while Davis was still married to her first husband.

This is a concerted effort to test what the new SCOTUS is going to grant the new "in group" in this country in terms of laws that bind the "out group" which in this case is the gay community.

People who have "religious objections" to doing their society provided job need to go live on a farm and mind their own business, like the Amish do. The rest of us are trying to move forward, not backward at the whim of some random hate-fueled individuals and or groups.

This, and abortion, are also the only contexts in which this particular type of objection ever comes up. Nobody who has a religious objection to alcohol is demanding that alcohol be banned so that they don't have to deal with it in their restaurant job, say. It's a fairly transparent pretext and it's kind of absurd that the media gives any credence to her _stated_ motivations.

If there’s something I, in theory, would like about the GoP in America it’s their libertarian ideology… but it’s a lie.

They believe in freedom, for them to restrict everyone else’s freedom. Of course that’s not freedom or libertarian or anything of the sort.

Even the political nature of the religious right isn’t about helping god’s children, it’s more about hating them and revoking any help they can get…

I went through exactly the same steps as you, and I think where people get hung up/disagree with you is on the "it doesn't affect me" step, and of course there's a small minority that's just assholes.

There's people who are prone to react to new ideas with curiosity and people who are prone to react to new ideas with suspicion, fear, intolerance. It's that simple. You're right, it's not rational. Identity by gender/sexuality/race/etc. is so fundamental, so the latter group reacts most strongly and negatively to new ideas about identity. Religion fans the flames. Most don't take back control from their religious upbrining the way you did.

Some people think state-recognized marriage is a special privileged legal status for the purpose of having and raising kids. Ie, that the focus actually isn't on the adults who are the ones to get married. In which case, couples who know they can't possibly have kids are trying to con the state out of the benefits without accepting the associated responsibility. I don't know what faction of people with this view take is to it's logical conclusion regarding for example infertility, but I'd be very surprised if there weren't at least a few and not completely shocked if it was a majority.

It could also be indicative of the issues bigots have with their own sexuality. A good example of this, was a Hungarian MEP who as a married man and an author of ultra-conservative Hungarian constitution defining marriage as being between man and woman only was caught fleeing a gay sex-party in the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zsef_Sz%C3%A1jer

What's going on inside their head is disgust. They have been told that some people are dirty, and the revulsion comes from a place deeper than rational thought. Once you believe that, you'll believe anything about your opponents: that they want to kill you, that they want to molest children, that they hate decency and want to destroy your country.

Steven Pinker does a good demonstration: he takes a brand new comb out of a package and stirs a glass of water with it, then offers it to you to drink. You know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is nothing wrong with the water. And yet a fair number of people won't do it, and those who do will still feel just a little weird about it.

That's extremely low stakes. The higher the stakes, the harder it will be to overcome it.

Clearly, you did, and others have as well. But for many others, the constant reinforcement of their prejudices means that they simply won't reconsider their premises. As far as they're concerned, these are basic facts that are confirmed for them every day. The only people who tell you otherwise are disgusting and dirty.

For some people, it is literally a fear that they ways in which they are specially privileged is being attacked. This was particularly obvious in the debates about equal marriage in the noughties and tens; people claiming that same-sex marriage would 'devalue' their own marriage. Which, in their eyes I suppose it might, because it would diminish how special they were.

But you see similar themes in most anti-equality movements, just generally a bit more veiled (I was kind of astonished how _blatant_ the opponents of equal marriage were about basically admitting "we object to this because it is an attack on how society considers us to be better than you").

The Roberts Court (especially since Gorsuch/Kavanaugh/ACB) looks out for circuit splits like any other, but it readily accepts (and sometimes telegraphs requests for) cases claiming that the last judicial regime's precedents were wrongly decided on non-originalism paradigms.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the 2022 case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization: "In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell."

disastrous how? To me it seems like the states are starting the 20-30 year process of legislating it themselves that should have happened and been mostly done by now but was instead stopped in its tracks and allowed to fester, strengthening the religious right (which is a very bad thing). The first 15 years will suck as some states try unconstitutional things and get smacked down but you guys will get to a spot where you have slightly different laws by state that most people can agree on and the issue will mostly die down by the end rather than fester and get larger and larger support against it like it has to this point. You can generally tell when the supreme court gets it wrong by whether the issue slides into the background as obviously correct to most people after a generation or two or if the issue gets bigger and bigger and this issue got bigger and bigger. abortion falls into the latter category. (And I love abortion. It's killed so many future criminals you see it in the crime stats. I'm not a crazed religious person, I'm an atheist, so you can't write the above opinion off as that).

With conservatives its always rules for you, not for me.