NC Senate considers bill for magistrates to opt-out of SSM marriages

[MaxQue]

Maybe they should pass a law allowing officers to opt-out of being in a gay pride parade.

Can straight people refuse to be married by magistrates who refuse to marry same sex couples?

If this passes, then the magistrate who objects to the same-sex marriage will not be officiating marriages at all.

I don't see why. It's like a variation of the gay wedding cake. Some gay couple wants a wedding cake, the business say yes (you and Ernest have argued they could say no, but in that case, it's irrelevent). The employee refuses to do so? Does he have the right to decline to do what his boss told him to do?

Can an employee decline to serve a gay couple for religious reasons, despite being asked to do so by his boss?

As for the second part, I have no issue with that.

[MaxQue]

I think everyone is ignoring something very important here which is that this is NOT like the wedding cake scenario in the least because a magistrate is not an employee of a private business but rather a state official. When a public employee discriminates in this fashion, it is state action of the very type that the 14th amendment forbids. Unlike a private business, the state does NOT have the right to refuse service to whoever they choose.

The employee is a representative of the state, but is not the state in total, so you do not have a right for a particular employee of the state to do something if the state can do that same something just as well with another employee. Whether or not that is the case would be the question as to whether this bill is workable.

That's a clear violation of the management rights of the employer. The employer decides what the employee is doing, not the reverse! You can ask your boss to not do it, but nothing is forcing him to agree with you.