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The Gallant Old Republic wrote:

Today's Tangle was one of his worst: Issac Saul has no concept of what religious liberty is or, for that matter, what religion is.

"This argument seems to most often come from the religious right, where the greatest threat to women or young boys and girls is not trans people but straight, cisgender men, specifically religious leaders, who have a long and storied history of sexual assault."

A quote I pulled from it-and just a ridiculous one. There is no 'storied' history of sexual assault on the religious right, even the scandals of the Catholic church at their peak show lower rates of sexual assault than for public schoolteachers. Even if one did not know those statistics, though (and one really should not be getting on their high horse if they do not know the numbers), the Catholic scandal does not even conform to that line of attack: The priests in question were not being accused of sexually assaulting females.

Then we get the typical line: "t we live in a country that is not just built on freedom of religion but freedom from religion — the distinct separation of God’s law from America’s law. We need to walk a line between not forcing religious institutions into violating their own faiths and not allowing the same institutions to force their faith-based beliefs onto the public at large." I still have yet to see someone explain to me how operating your own bakery, on your own property, that people voluntarily can come to or not come to, is forcing one's beliefs on 'the public at large.' There are no Republicans writing legislation to mandate discrimination.

I am very much of the opinion that religious liberty is a dead letter, it is only going to further sink, primarily from the teachings of today that are pushed on every kid going through the education system, but also because they are not really defensible: I'd actually make the case that it is extraordinarily difficult to make a convincing case for religious liberty as a standalone value outside of churches, because the argument always starts with conceding ground: the anti-religious liberty argument is something like a reductio ad absurdum "Well you wouldn't give people religious liberty to [commit X crime], and the defender then agrees, and is subsequently at a severe disadvantage in trying to then explain why religious liberty does not apply there, but should apply in whatever other issue is being debated.

The only effective defense that can really be raised is freedom of association, which, at least in most of these cases, covers for religious liberty as well. Arguments for that have a significantly stronger foundation, because it is not sort of a wishy-washy "Religious people should be exempted from X law, but not from Y", but rather "You have the right, with and on your own property, to contract or not contract with anyone."

I think we're all screwed either way, more or less every institution of power is now aligned behind the notion of legally enforcing a certain view of morality (actual ACLU liberalism is all but dead), but freedom of association at least has better odds in a world where people are increasingly taught, and teach, that religious views are fundamentally hateful and thus that one should not tolerate the intolerant.

I wonder if it ever will occur to the people saying that "We need freedom from religion" that they are seeking to legally mandate a certain dogma of subjective morality. I doubt it.