Several years ago the Lincoln City Council passed a so-called "Fairness Ordinance" that was... fairly bonkers. We wrote about it at the time.
The short version is that the ordinance was chiefly concerned with "public accommodations," which it defined, essentially, as being any place in the city aside from private homes. It also defined violations of the ordinance as being any "speech" that gave "offense" that took place in a public accommodation. So, per the letter of the ordinance, a pastor reading Romans 1 in the pulpit on Sunday morning would be in violation of the city's Fairness Ordinance. Fines for violating the ordinance started lower, but escalated up to $50,000 per offense.
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Jake Meador
Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, National Review, Comment, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. He is a contributing editor with Plough and a contributing writer at the Dispatch. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.
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