Vincent J. Curtis
8 April 2015
It has been widely mischaracterized in the media of both
right and left wing persuasion that George Stephanopoulos embarrassed a
defenseless Indiana Governor Mike Pence in an interview that was aired on the
ABC News program “This Week,” hosted by Mr. Stephanopoulos, on March 29th,
2015.
The subject of the interview was Indiana’s new Religious
Freedom Restoration Act that was signed into law by Governor Pence on March 26th,
2015. It was widely alleged that the
purpose of the law was to enable religious-minded small businesses in the state
to discriminate against gays and lesbians and allow them to refuse them certain
services, such as provide wedding cakes or to photograph gay weddings when such
activities would be repugnant to the religious views of the business
owner. Governor Pence appeared on “This
Week” to dispel this widely reported and vicious mischaracterization of the Indiana
RFRA.
The allegedly poor performance by Governor Pence is said to
have all but eliminated any chance he may have had to run successfully for the
Republican nomination for President in 2016, and in which he was thought to be
interested.
The interview is available in its entirety on Youtube.
A review of that interview shows that the alleged drubbing
that Stephanopoulos gave Pence is a canard.
Governor Pence was on the show to hammer home his talking points about
the law, and spoke a great deal of the time.
This method of seeming to be interviewed but for the purpose of driving
home a message is widely used by politicians on television, and has the
unfortunate effect of having the interviewers asking questions that are not
answered by the interviewee. At least,
not appearing to.
Except at the very end of the interview, when Stephanopoulos
asked a “have you stopped beating your wife?” question, Pence actually did
eventually get around to answering the questions put to him by
Stephanopoulos. He just had to fully
elaborate his talking point before he discovered that, in fact, the answer was
in the heaping pile of words he just delivered.
Stephanopoulos, anxious to get his next question in, failed to recognize
that somewhere in the forest he was presented with was the tree that bore the
answer to his previous question.
Because Pence spoke at such length to every question,
Stephanopoulos was bulldozed by Pence and he was not able to force Pence to
confront the matter of discrimination against gays and lesbians until the very
end.
What failed to come through in the interview, despite Pence’s
best efforts and because of Stephanopoulos’s obtuseness, was that the new
Indiana law does not apply to disputes between private individuals.
The RFRA applies to cases in which state law is said to
apply to a matter in dispute. In this
situation, the judge is instructed by the RFRA to apply the principle of ‘strict
scrutiny’ to the case. That means that
the state has to show that a compelling state interest in the matter requires
that the individual contesting a law on religious grounds must comply with the
law regardless of religious scruples.
This is a high standard for the state to meet; members of certain religious
groups in the United States have been exempted from the draft in time of war on
the grounds of religious beliefs. It is
a legal application of common sense to certain matters, and that the RFRA was
made necessary at the federal and state level is due to the Supreme Court of
the United States that in 1992 threw out common sense on religious matters as a
basis for judgement.
What has been said of Indiana’s new RFRA is that it now
enables private individuals to discriminate against gays and lesbians on
religious grounds in the state. This is
flatly not true because it has always been the law that private individuals can
make choices. To discriminate is to make
a choice, and in a free country individuals are allowed to exercise their free
will. What made Jim Crow laws repugnant
was that the state imposed its will upon the right of private individuals, as
well as on local and state authorities, to make choices. To treat whites and blacks the same
indiscriminately was a choice forbidden by a Jim Crow law. The various RFRA in the United States are
like Jim Crow laws in reverse, forcing the government to demonstrate necessity
of compliance with certain laws that may conflict with the religious conscience
of a citizen.
Thus by bulldozing Stephanopoulos, Pence retained control of
the interview and never was embarrassed by him.
At the end of the interview, Stephanopoulos desperately asked “Should it
be legal in the state of Indiana to discriminate against gays and lesbians?”
This is a loaded question, and questions like these are why
politicians only speak in talking points in televised interviews. Pence, exasperated, spoke of tolerance being
a two-way street, which, while true, failed to meet the loaded question. He ought to have answered that the question
just asked had nothing to do with the new Indiana law. That answer would not only have the advantage
of being true, it would have thoroughly befuddled George Stephanopoulos at a
time when he could not recover.
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