Contending For Religious Liberty: A Win in North Carolina

The new law in North Carolina is known as SB 2.  If a government official (magistrate) cannot in good conscience perform a same-sex marriage, a magistrate from another county can be brought in to conduct the marriage.

In McDowell County, every magistrate refused to perform a gay wedding.  (Sounds like a good place to live; and it also sounds like a pretty normal county in the Southern United States.)  So the county was sued, but on Wednesday the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit threw out the case.  (It now surprises me when a court gets it right on the clash between LGBT and religious liberty.)

Matt Staver of the Liberty Counsel said that the court's decision means that government officials "have the constitutional right to follow their conscience and rights to free exercise without fear of punishment."  It also means that Christians who cannot in good conscience support or participate in same-sex weddings have the right to serve in government.

Phil Berger, a Republican Senator in North Carolina said, "Once again, a federal court has rejected the idea that exercising one's First Amendment religious freedoms somehow infringes on other's rights."  Those are important words.  The new claim of the left is that religious liberty is simply being used by Christians as an excuse to discriminate and mistreat people from the LGBT community.  But that's ridiculous.  Refusing to participate in events or promote messages that violate my religion is not discrimination, it is part of what it means to exercise my religion.  The exercise of religion is not simply agreeing with certain doctrines, or attending the church of one's choice, or reading a holy book and saying prayers; the essence of religious exercise, at least in a Christian sense, is a devoted relationship with God and a life that is fully pleasing to Him.

SB 2 and the court's decision are both big wins for Christians in North Carolina, and throughout the country.  Praise the Lord!

For more on this story, see the article by Christian Post reporter Samuel Smith, "North Carolina Magistrates Don't Have to Perform Gay Weddings, US Appeals Court Rules."

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