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

[bedstuy]

It seems to me that people with very strict, specific fundamentalist religious beliefs about marriage shouldn't work for a government body that performs the secular judicial/administrative function of marriage for the government. 

It would be the same for a devout Jew who wanted to be a meat plant inspector, but wouldn't set foot inside plant that processed pork.  Perhaps your employer could accommodate that some of the time, but it's silly to expect that as a right.

[bedstuy]

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.

If all the straight couples who go to the county courthouse have to wait one hour to get a marriage license while all the gay couples have to wait two hours while the court finds a judge willing to do it, then discrimination has occurred, state action is present, the gay couple can bring a section 1983 claim against the judge, and they should win their lawsuit.

I thought they were exempt from that?