When "religious freedom" means the opposite
Civil marriage and religious marriage are theoretically different things, administered by different entities for different purposes. In practice they are deeply intertwined—which makes marriage a potent space for a church/state conflict.
Kim Davis’s religious community has the right to define religious marriage for its own purposes. The county clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, wants to impose that definition on the office she runs and the civil marriages it administers, and she claims her free exercise rights allow this. The rhetoric of religious freedom from government control is thus flipped to defend the religious control of government—Dominionism in Enlightenment clothing.
Not that conservative Christian concerns about religious freedom are on the whole trivial or misleading. People who provide public accommodations have free exercise rights, and when these clash with other people’s rights not to be discriminated against, that’s a genuine problem and a thorny one.
