The city’s nondiscrimination ordinance and Pocatello’s only currently operating for-profit wedding chapel should live happily ever after.

Della Jolley, who co-owns The Joulet Wedding and Reception Center with her husband, Norman, said Tuesday she would not turn down a same-sex couple wanting to use her facility, a former church at 180 McKinley Ave.

“(I will accommodate a gay marriage) because I am deeply religious and I believe the lord … has given us free advocacy,” she said.

Jolley defines “free advocacy” as a God-given right for each individual to believe and act as they are so inclined.

Yet in Idaho’s panhandle, things are all but wedded bliss between a for-profit chapel there and the city of Coeur d’Alene, which also has a nondiscrimination ordinance.

The Spokeman-Review reported that on Friday the owners of the Hitching Post filed a federal lawsuit against that city claiming that the town is unconstitutionally forcing them to violate their religious beliefs by performing same-sex marriages.

The Spokane, Wash., newspaper reports that Hitching Post owners Donald and Evelyn Knapp say in the lawsuit that they believe marriage is a sacred covenant between a man and a woman.

“Performing same-sex wedding ceremonies would thus force the Knapps to condone, promote and even consecrate something forbidden by their religious beliefs and ordination vows,” the suit reads.

But in Pocatello, Jolley, who describes herself as a straight, “tea-totaling Mormon married to one man for many years” who personally believes that marriage is between “one man and one woman” has the opposite view.

“I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t believe in premarital relations, and I know many who do,” Jolley said, adding that she does not wish to impose her personal and religious views on others, particularly on those who are part of the gay community.

“There is more good in a person than their sexual preference,” she said. “If I point a finger at you, there are three fingers pointing back at me.”

Jolley went on to say, “I would be the devil’s advocate (if I refused to accommodate a same-sex couple). I’d be taking away God’s gift of free advocacy.”

Unlike the Knapps in Coeur d’Alene, Jolley said neither she nor her husband performs wedding ceremonies. It is up to couple to find the person qualified to perform the wedding ceremony inside the Pocatello chapel.

The Jolleys merely provide the chapel, the reception hall, also located in the former church, and the decorations, food and accoutrements associated with a wedding reception.

The Spokesman-Review reports that, according to the Knapps’ lawsuit, a man called the Coeur d’Alene wedding chapel Friday to ask about a same-sex wedding ceremony and was turned down. The Knapps are now asking for a temporary restraining order against the city to stop it from enforcing the ordinance. Violation of the ordinance is a misdemeanor punishable by fines and jail time, similar to penalties associated with Pocatello’s nondiscrimination ordinance.

“The Knapps are thus under a constant, coercive and substantial threat to violate their religious beliefs due to the risk that they will incur the penalties of jail time and criminal fines for declining to speak a message and perform a wedding service that contradicts their religious beliefs and ministerial vows,” the lawsuit reads.

As for Jolley, she said she has had only one inquiry about her facility’s availability for a same-sex wedding. She said the man had called her chapel earlier this year when Pocatello voters were considering whether to repeal the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance aimed at protecting gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered individuals from being turned down for housing and services because of their sexual orientation. She said the man never called back to complete that reservation.

Kirk Bybee, the city of Pocatello’s chief civil attorney, said, at the request of City Council, he incorporated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and an Idaho statute that protects “free exercise of religion” when drafting the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance.

But Bybee added that, contrary to what many may think, the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom is not absolute.

“The government can restrict the free exercise of religion,” he said using the extreme what-if example of a religious group requiring that the first born of every family be put to do death.

“Then, of course, the government would have to step in,” he said.

More realistically, Bybee said the federal government has restricted religious freedoms in the past in cases involving polygamy, the racist activities of the Ku Klux Klan and Native American’s claim that ingesting peyote is a sacred religious right.

Bybee said, speaking personally and not in his capacity as a city attorney, that pro-religious-freedom advocates like the Knapps don’t do their cause any favors by bringing lawsuits because those lawsuits, if anything, only serve to more narrowly define religious freedom.

The Knapps’ lawsuit claims the city of Coeur d’Alene’s ordinance is a violation of the couple’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights along with a violation of the Idaho Free Exercise of Religion Protected Act.

According to the Spokesman-Review, the lawsuit was filed by Georgia and Arizona-based attorneys for Alliance Defending Freedom in partnership with Coeur d’Alene attorney Virginia McNulty Robinson. The group’s website defines ADF as a “legal ministry that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.”