Utah lawsuit against medical marijuana claims it violates the 'religious freedom' of ... landlords
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While being appropriately respectful to all major religions, the new lawsuit against legalizing medical marijuana in Utah is dumb and stupid and wrong and everyone involved should feel bad about themselves. In the complaint, opponents of Proposition 2 — whUtah lawsuit against medical marijuana claims it violates the 'religious freedom' of ... landlords
While being appropriately respectful to all major religions, the new lawsuit against legalizing medical marijuana in Utah is dumb and stupid and wrong and everyone involved should feel bad about themselves. In the complaint, opponents of Proposition 2 — which would legalize marijuana for people with an array of health conditions — said the ballot initiative would tread on their freedom of religion. The group says the measure would violate the religious beliefs of Walter J. Plumb, an attorney and active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who is the primary financier of the opposition campaign. Specifically, the claim is that barring landlords from refusing to rent to medical marijuana cardholders violates those landlords' «religious belief» that their tenants should just suck it up and deal with their illnesses using only the specific list of medicines a given landlord individually decides they approve of, a nonsensical sewage leak of an argument that shares the same fatal flaws as most other «religious» demands that everyone a certain «religious» person interacts with must be compelled to adhere to the «religious» edicts that Bob So-And-So demands of them. This is a landlord-tenant relationship. There's nothing religious about it. If your «religion» forbids you from renting to individuals who use certain pharmaceutical substances, get out of the rental business. Invest in coins instead, maybe? Boom, problem solved. According to this argument, it might be against a given American landlord's religion to consume certain «drugs, substances and chemicals”—but you can be absolutely assured that not once have any of these would-be Holy Apartment Renters checked to verify that their tenants with cancer were not using opioid-based pain medication because that would be monstrous and nobody would dare do such a thing. The »religious" objection being raised, then, is a purely faith-based presumption that Jeebus hates certain medically useful chemicals more than other medically useful chemicals, and given that we currently have no way of asking about it, it does not provide a plausible basis for law-making. (As far as Jesus goes, many of the Bible's greatest miracles revolve around providing ample quantities of alcohol so there's two strikes against the premise before we've even left the New Testament. But whatever.) Read more