Religious liberty and SSM in D.C.

As the Washington Post reports:

[F]ive law professors and Marc D. Stern, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, sent a letter to council members Friday asking that religious organizations be given more latitude to deny services for same-sex weddings.

The group wants the bill to say that "a religious organization, association or society, or an individual" can deny "services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges" for same-sex marriages without fear of running afoul of anti-discrimination laws.

Robin Fretwell Wilson, a professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, said that without such protection, religious organizations and nonprofit groups could leave the city. Catholic Charities of Boston, she said, stopped adoption services in 2006 after Massachusetts tried to force it to comply with a law allowing gay residents to adopt children. . . .

Here (Download DC letter FINAL) is the law professors' letter, which Tom Berg and I, and others, signed.

UPDATE:  Another of the signers, Prof. Robin Fretwell Wilson, has an op-ed in the Washington Post today.  She concludes:

Some charge that religious accommodations are nothing more than government-authorized gay animus. In this view, any objection to assisting with same-sex marriages must reflect anti-gay sentiment. Yet many people have no objection generally to providing services to gays but would object to directly facilitating same-sex marriages. For them, marriage ceremonies have religious significance because marriage is a religious institution, and weddings are sacraments. Without explicit protection, these individuals and groups will face a cruel choice: their consciences or their livelihoods.

Same-sex marriage and religious liberty do not have to conflict. The council need only clarify that people and organizations can step aside from facilitating same-sex marriages if participating would violate deeply held religious beliefs, provided this creates no hardship for same-sex couples.

There is nothing radical about attaching meaningful religious liberty protections to same-sex marriage bills. Legislators in New Hampshire, Connecticut and Vermont have done so. D.C. Council members have a golden opportunity to go even further and offer the first truly robust protection for religious believers and thereby prove: We can help same-sex families without hurting people and faith communities that believe in traditional marriage.

Thoughts?