Uh--Are the Georgia Republicans about to legalize drugs?
Georgia Bill Helps Wife Beaters
By Jay Michaelson, The Daily Beast
15 March 15
Georgia is poised to pass the nations harshest religious freedom law, allowing discrimination, judicial obstruction, and even domestic violence. Yet while the bill is far worse than Arizonas notorious Turn the Gays Away bill, its attracted far less attention from national advocacy groups and businesses.
The bill, the Georgia Religious Freedom Restoration Act, is one of a raft of similar bills (RFRAs, for short) wending their way through state legislatures across the country. The bills are part of the backlash against same-sex marriage, but they go much farther than that. Like the Hobby Lobby decision, which allows closely-held corporations to opt out of part of Obamacare, these laws carve out exemptions to all kinds of laws if a person (or corporation) offers a religious reason for not obeying them.
Georgias act says that the government cannot substantially burden a persons exercise of religion without a compelling governmental interest and the least restrictive means of furthering that interest. This is the classic three-prong test that was at issue in Hobby Lobby, and is considered extremely difficult to meet.
Georgias RFRA also specifies that exercise of religion can be just about any practice or observance of religion, whether or not compelled by or central to a system of religious belief.
In other words, if I say its my religious exercise, it is.
If the state doesn't have a "compelling interest" in reducing domestic violence or racial discrimination, how could they object to someone ingesting or inhaling some substance for spiritual purposes? Surely criminal sanctions of any kind would not qualify as the "least restrictive means of furthering" any hypothetical "compelling interest."