And, indeed, the various legislatures that have redefined marriage have added to their laws at least a few significant provisions to protect the religious freedom of individuals and organizations whose convictions have not evolved the way President Obama says his convictions did. The insignificant provisions that are commonly present are legal paragraphs assuring clergy and houses of worship that they are safe from being required to preside over marriages that they do not regard to be marriages. Such provisions are insignificant because the protection is provided by the state and federal constitutions and is not a matter to be granted (or withheld) by the legislature.

What is significant, instead, is to protect churches and other religious organizations from being required to lease their facilities for gay weddings; to protect counselors and counseling centers from losing their licenses if their views of marriage don’t change to fit the new state definition; to protect religious schools that teach and recognize only “traditional” marriages as divinely ordained; to enable civil servants not to officiate at gay weddings if they have a deep objection and another civil servant can take over instead; to allow faith-based adoption and foster-care agencies to continue to place children in religious mother-father married families without having such action be deemed illegal discrimination; to safeguard from lawsuits wedding caterers, bed-and-breakfast owners, photography shops, and other small businesses who have a conscientious objection to celebrating and facilitating marriages they believe to be wrong on religious grounds.

In short, what needs to be protected is not clergy who object to officiating for same-sex weddings, but religious individuals and institutions who have a sincere religious conviction against celebrating and facilitating same-sex marriages and a sincere religious conviction against treating such marriages as valid in the their own lives and in the operations of their religious organizations.

None of the legislatures that have adopted same-sex marriage have included all or even most of these protections, but they have generally added at least of few of them.

And the same-sex marriage activists in the Illinois legislature? House Bill 5170, which was considered in the 2012 session, proposed merely to duplicate the constitutional protections against clergy being forced to solemnize marriages that violate their convictions. Fortunately, the bill died at the end of the session. But already a new bill has been introduced, HB 110. This one adds just minimal additional protections (clergy who will not officiate at gay weddings cannot be sued or penalized; religious organizations cannot be forced to host same-sex celebrations or ceremonies; religious organizations do not lose their freedom to make religion-based employment decisions)–and does so in the most skimpy way possible (the employment protections only apply to ministerial-type positions; the protections against making facilities available for gay weddings does not apply if the facility is available to the public for rental).

Even as an initial bargaining position, the bill is hard to interpret as a serious effort to mitigate the predictable damage that marriage redefinition will do to religious freedom in Illinois. Whether they favor marriage redefinition or not, will legislators and citizens in Illinois accept this paltry accommodation?

The proposed Rhode Island same-sex marriage bill is no better. H 5015, scheduled for a House Judiciary Committee hearing today, which boasts more than half of the House’s members as co-sponsors, includes an essentially meaningless section with the grandiouse title, “Protection of freedom of religion in marriage.” The section claims to secure to every Rhode Island religion “exclusive control over its own religious doctrine, policy, and teachings regarding who may marry within their faith, and on what terms,” and proclaims that clergy persons will not be required to solemnize marriage they object to.

But no one expects churches to be forced by government to redefine their doctrine; no one expects that US officials will drag pastors or rabbis before gay couples and force them to officiate at their weddings. H 5015 admits that its assurances have no punch-the protections it supposedly guarantees are just those rights and freedoms that are “consistent with the guarantees of freedom of religion” established by the US and Rhode Island constitutions!

Further reading:

Go here for links to:

* Letter to Illinois Governor Pat Quinn from constitutional law scholars, analyzing the religious freedom impact of same-sex marriage and proposing full religious freedom protections