Saw this on lgbtqnation.com and wanted to offer my opinion.

OKLAHOMA CITY — The Oklahoma House has approved legislation that grants immunity from civil liability to ministers who refuse to officiate a same-sex marriage.

House members voted 88-7 Thursday for the bill by Republican Rep. David Brumbaugh. The measure now goes to the state Senate.

The bill grants licensed ministers in the state immunity from any civil claim based on their refusal to recognize a marriage that violates the minister’s “conscience or religious beliefs.”

The measure is one of several that have been targeted by gay rights groups as discriminatory against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

The problem is, it doesn’t seem that anyone within the LGBTQ community is calling this discriminatory or problematic. In fact, most see it as a waste of time and money, designed to perpetuate lies and misinformation about same-sex marriage.

Marriage Equality is all about the right to Civil Marriage and has nothing to do with the religious rite of marriage or the actions of religious institutions. Churches and their spiritual staff persons have always been exempt from judicial/legislative ideas about discrimination protections. For example, Everywhere it is not legal to discriminate on the basis of sex, but no one has ever tried to force the Catholic Church to accept female priests.

This bill isn’t potentially troubling however. Christian denominations and anti-gay groups are doing everything in their power to muddy the distinctions between staff of a known religious entity such as a church, and people who work in the general work force who happy to be religious, such as bakers, bridal shop owners, and the like.

This strategy and effort is to pretend that ministers do what they do because of their personal religious beliefs rather than because they are performing tasks related to their work or profession.

Indeed, even after same-sex civil marriage is legal in the whole of the United States, this battle will not be over, however, the anti-gay side will have lost most if not all of its power once same-sex families have the legal protections of civil marriage– if we don’t see a deterioration of non-discrimination protections in the public/secular arena.

via Oklahoma House OKs bill protecting ministers who refuse same-sex marriages – LGBTQ Nation.