Quotes from John Corvino

We should not confuse complete faith in God with complete faith in our ability to discern God's voice.

There is a fine line between reading a message from the text and reading one into the text.

Belief in an infallible God does not make one infallible.

How do you explain to someone who thinks you're the devil incarnate, that you're really not?

Sacred cows don't tip easily.

the law cannot respect the conscience of flesh-and-blood human beings unless it also recognizes conscience claims brought by the corporations they form.

A person is better off for having performed sincere religious acts even when they rest on false premises.

twenty-three years of RFRAs to produce anarchy,

The new version would cover both opponents and supporters of same-sex marriage. Immediately thereafter, the Family Research Council, an influential conservative Christian lobbying organization, withdrew its support.60 The reason is obvious: Their goal in supporting FADA was not to protect freedom but to signal disapproval of same-sex marriage. It was liberty for me, but not for thee—a repeat of the Puritan mistake.

convictions, as it did by requiring the Hahns and Greens in Hobby Lobby to lose millions, or their business. Corvino

Hobby Lobby is also the first case ever to treat a for-profit corporation as a person capable of practicing religion.

Then why should the side effects of your exercise of religious freedom effectively "impose your religion" on those affected—or undermine their own freedom of religion?

Thomas Jefferson's classic formulation: 'it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

It is not surprising that efforts to keep gay, lesbian, and bisexual people in their place arise in the wedding context. Sexual orientation is a relational property; it's about the sex or gender of the people with whom you have relationships or desire to have relationships. It manifests itself in the context of those relationships, and unless it manifests itself, would-be discriminators can't target it.

Anderson and Girgis insist that it is not, because the baker's "reason for refusing to bake same-sex wedding cakes is manifestly not to avoid contact with gay people on equal terms" (p. 191). But that's a strange claim, given that the bakers are refusing to sell gay people the very same items they sell to other customers. They do so precisely because they judge same-sex relationships to be morally inferior.

the soundness of an argument depends on its content and logical structure rather than on who offers it.

The plain fact is that Kim Davis wanted to hold gay people to a different standard than her fellow divorcees: For gays, she would enforce "God's law" here on earth. For divorcees, "That's between them and God." Like so many of her fellow social conservatives, she selectively cited the Bible to justify discrimination against a marginalized group while giving a free pass to those in the majority like herself. Such

In substituting her religious beliefs for the law, Kim Davis placed burdens on third parties who did not share those beliefs. Such actions look less like religious liberty than religious discrimination.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg has put the point sharply: "With or without [religion], you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."120

First, just because people's religious beliefs can be easily accommodated, it does not follow that they should. Sometimes accommodations reinforce sentiments that ought to be repudiated. Second, given that one of the best reasons for religious accommodations is the history of antireligious discrimination, religious accommodations ought not be used as a license to discriminate.

the ultimate objective of antidiscrimination law is not to punish haters (not all discriminators are haters) but to ensure equal access in the public sphere. This

Whether a distinction is invidious—rooted in harmful attitudes or ideas about a group and so likely to spread contempt—depends not on whether it's conduct- or status-based but on the reasoning behind it. Invidious distinctions are rooted in unfair, socially debilitating attitudes or ideas about people's worth, proper social status, abilities, or actions. By

invidious is the fact that those ideas about African Americans are unfair and socially debilitating. Some

there's a significant difference between granting exemptions to a finite, dwindling group of employers during a transition period and granting exemptions to any employer who might ever raise a religiously framed objection, in perpetuity. A