Utah lawsuit against medical marijuana claims it violates the 'religious freedom' of ... landlords

By Hunter
Source: dailykos.com


Meanwhile, in Israel...


While being appropriately respectful to all major religions, the new lawsuit against legalizing medical marijuana in Utah is dumb and stupid and wrong and everyone involved should feel bad about themselves.

In the complaint, opponents of Proposition 2 — which would legalize marijuana for people with an array of health conditions — said the ballot initiative would tread on their freedom of religion.

The group says the measure would violate the religious beliefs of Walter J. Plumb, an attorney and active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who is the primary financier of the opposition campaign.

Specifically, the claim is that barring landlords from refusing to rent to medical marijuana cardholders violates those landlords' "religious belief" that their tenants should just suck it up and deal with their illnesses using only the specific list of medicines a given landlord individually decides they approve of, a nonsensical sewage leak of an argument that shares the same fatal flaws as most other "religious" demands that everyone a certain "religious" person interacts with must be compelled to adhere to the "religious" edicts that Bob So-And-So demands of them.

This is a landlord-tenant relationship. There's nothing religious about it. If your "religion" forbids you from renting to individuals who use certain pharmaceutical substances, get out of the rental business. Invest in coins instead, maybe? Boom, problem solved.

According to this argument, it might be against a given American landlord's religion to consume certain "drugs, substances and chemicals”—but you can be absolutely assured that not once have any of these would-be Holy Apartment Renters checked to verify that their tenants with cancer were not using opioid-based pain medication because that would be monstrous and nobody would dare do such a thing. The "religious" objection being raised, then, is a purely faith-based presumption that Jeebus hates certain medically useful chemicals more than other medically useful chemicals, and given that we currently have no way of asking about it, it does not provide a plausible basis for law-making. (As far as Jesus goes, many of the Bible's greatest miracles revolve around providing ample quantities of alcohol so there's two strikes against the premise before we've even left the New Testament. But whatever.)

None of this is a scalable method of religious "freedom." The freedom to practice a given religion ends when it requires other Americans to abide by your religious tenets as well because you would find it unacceptably "offensive" if they did not. It's not true of birth control, it's not true of dietary consumption during certain Wednesdays, it's not true of medical remedies. If your religion requires you to discriminate against other human beings, remove thyself from that business and find a new career in which discrimination against your clients becomes unnecessary. Instead of being a judgmental pharmacist, be a judgmental street-paver. Instead of renting apartments, grow corn. Heaven knows nobody has done anything immoral while on corn syrup.

Where was I? Ah. The lawsuit. Yeah, it's not expected to go anywhere because it's deeply stupid. But we'll have to keep an eye on it anyway, because our country continues to be in a deeply stupid mood.