In the argument over same-sex marriage, social conservatives have seen a string of defeats. For all intents and purposes, they have lost the argument based on straightforward morality (“gay sex is wrong”) and the argument based on social harm (“it will undermine straight marriage”). But the last-ditch argument that, in the wake of the California ruling, seems to be getting more play is the religious freedom argument. The idea here is that traditional religious believers will be coerced into compromising their beliefs in order to accomodate gay couples. I’ve even seen some extremely hysterical people (mostly confined to blog comment threads, unsurprisingly) talking about “persecution,” the death of religious freedom in America, and so on.

This post at the Volokh Conspiracy offers a reasoned response to all this. It examines several recent examples where SSM opponents have identified a looming threat to religious freedom and points out that, in nearly all the cases, it was either a question of a religious organization providing a public service and/or the pertinent laws were non-discrimination laws that had nothing to do with marriage per se. In other words, these were not cases of churches being forced to perform marriages between people of the same sex. The issue at hand was generally whether organizations providing public services or accomodations (whether religious or not) are free to flout anti-discrimination laws that cover sexual orientation.

This isn’t to deny that there may at times be a genuine conflict between religious principle and politically enshrined rights. But the angst about gay marriage being the death knell of religious freedom seems to be greatly overdone.