Timothy P. Carney, writing for the Washington Examiner, has provided us with an excellent analysis of why it is perfectly logical and symmetrical to support gay rights, but to also support refusals to provide goods/services which are against someone\’s religious and/or moral beliefs.
I am providing a significant excerpt below, but urge you to click here and read it all:
“This case is not about a wedding cake or a marriage,” (Oregon Labor Commissioner brad) Avakian wrote, as reported by Kelsey Harkness at the Daily Signal. “It is about a business\’s refusal to serve someone because of their sexual orientation. Under Oregon law, that is illegal.”
But that\’s wrong, and it\’s wrong in a morally important way. If a baker refused to sell a donut or a birthday cake to someone because that person was gay, that would be unjust discrimination, and illegal in a lot of places. But if a baker says, no I won\’t cater your wedding, that\’s refusing to participate materially in a ceremony you find morally objectionable.
This distinction is obvious and clear, but somehow it evades the Javerts of the Pink Police State.
Washington State Atty. Gen. Bob Ferguson made the same conflation, when florist Baronelle Stutzman told her longtime customer she wouldn\’t participate in his gay wedding. “If Ms. Stutzman sells flowers to heterosexual couples,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer quotes Ferguson saying, “she must sell them to same-sex couples.”
But obviously she did — that\’s how he was a regular customer.
It\’s not surprising this distinction is lost on a set of people who see only black and white. Once the state acknowledges gay marriage, then everyone must acknowledge and celebrate gay marriage, their thinking goes. All things are either prohibited or mandatory. One only holds such views if one lacks the mental acuity to make distinctions.
My only points of disagreement with Mr. Carney are his use of the term “Pink Police State”, which I find offensive, and his contention that “One only holds such views if one lacks the mental acuity to make distinctions”. It is clearl to me that people can – and in these cases, I believe, do – hold views while cognizant of those distinctions. They just don\’t give a damn about them.
In any event, the distinction that Mr. Carney outlines is accurate, and very clear to anyone who does give a damn.
If an atheist goes into a bakery in an orthodox Jewish neighborhood and demands the baker provide a cake saying “God Doesn\’t Exist And Religion Is Ridiculous”, he\’s going to get his ass kicked out of that bakery. If it happens in Oregon, is brad avakian going to fine the baker $135,000 and put him out of business? Evidently he is.
Does this come across as the kind of United States you want? Because it sure as hell doesn\’t come across that way to me.
It is time – way past time, actually – for people to recognize what is going on here, to speak up, and to vote accordingly.
