Today’s Hobby Lobby case before SCOTUS, the recent Arizona bill, and other efforts around the country to carve out a religious exemption for discrimination, all have at their core the basic philosophical argument that religion is an entirely personal and private matter, is no business of the government’s, and there’s just no justification for government intervention to prevent discrimination especially when it’s justified on religious grounds.

Let’s perform a little thought experiment, shall we?

Suppose you’re a bigoted restaurant owner who justifies a “No XXXXXs Allowed!” policy on religious grounds.

One day, a group of Those People walks into your restaurant. You confront them, and let them know quite clearly that “we don’t serve your kind here. Get out!”.

They refuse to leave.

What do you do?

Any attempt to force them out will involve the government one way or another. You can’t make your bigoted views stick without government muscle. Your choices boil down to either calling the police–using the government directly to enforce your bigotry–or taking matters into your own hands and ending up in court anyway defending your actions, hoping that the government will passively support you by not jailing you for assault.

No man is an island. To live in a civilized society means that you’re one node in a vast network of relationships, and everyone’s actions affect everyone else. Bigotry that escapes from your head and manifests in the real world affects me through our societal relationship.

Christianists sometimes think they’re clever calling “secular humanism”, aka liberalism, a religion. OK then…my religion requires me to take offense at any attempt to use our shared government as an instrument of bigotry and discrimination and oppression. My religious rights will be violated if Hobby Lobby prevails before SCOTUS, just as they’d have been violated had Jan Brewer not resumed her meds and vetoed that awful Arizona discrimination bill.

Then I take a step back, and realize I’m arguing for something that we once took for granted as an essential feature of any civilized society. Why are we even having this debate about government-sanctioned discrimination at the beginning of the 21st century? This is appalling!