Religious Challenges to Anti-Discrimination Law: The Mobilization of the “Minority Label”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2018, the American and Canadian supreme courts released two high-profile decisions: the case of a Christian baker from Colorado who refused to create a cake for the celebration of a same-sex couple’s union, and the case of an evangelical Christian law school in British Columbia whose code of conduct prohibiting same-sex intimacy led to accreditation refusals by three provincial law societies. In both cases, religious believers argued that modern LGBTQ2+ anti-discrimination protections required them to act in ways that proved incompatible with their religious beliefs. While such “conflict of rights” are familiar to liberal democracies, this article demonstrates how these cases operate within a new paradigm in which religious actors, seeking exemptions from legal protections accorded to a vulnerable minority, claim minority status for themselves. Hoping to have their policy agenda seen in a new light, such opponents of LGBTQ2+ rights have replaced their discourse defending traditional mores with one arguing that the broadly cherished value of pluralism guarantees them a religious right to “dissent” from anti-discrimination protections. We dub this discursive process the mobilization of the “minority label.” In this article, we retrace the emergence of this new discourse by turning to the narratives crafted by parties, courts, and media in the two cases. We discuss the three main argumentative strategies through which the minority label manifests in discourses: language framing, moral symmetry arguments, and respectability claims. We then offer a comparative analysis which explores the different ways both courts reacted to this discourse. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the long-term risks that the rise of such a discourse implies for LGBTQ2+ rights.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".