Thursday, February 27, 2014

What if "I knew you were gay marrying so I baked a (crappy) cake"?

Could you sue me for not trying hard enough?  Could you have me jailed for 'cake quality discrimination'?  If you coerce my participation in your ceremony that I believe is wrong, haven't you enslaved me?

I note with cynicism the hysteria that exploded when Arizona tried to clarify their Religious Freedom Act - the same one that the US has at the Federal level. I had to sift through the first 80 Google listings before I found the first one that would actually explain what the law was - the first 79 were hateful gay rants against those who disagree with them on this issue, none of whom it seemed had bothered to read the language of the law.  Of course it was nothing particularly earth shattering.  It was simply an attempt to clarify the AZ RFRA to protect against abuses like that which happened recently in Colorado and New Mexico. It seems that in Colorado if you decline to photograph (which means participate in) a Gay Marriage on religious grounds you are now guilty of 'discrimination' and subject to a year in the State Prison.  Of course if you're a Gay Married Photographer and you decline to photograph a religious event that includes a sermon opposing gay marriage you would not be guilty of anything.  This is what passes for equality under the law in Colorado.  Perhaps it's all the drugs they're doing these days.

Of course there is no way that the religious would ask you to photograph an event that was diametrically opposed to your beliefs - at a minimum, they'd be afraid that you'd do a poor job.  Which begs the question:  why would the gay marrying couple want, indeed ask someone who disagreed with their choice to photograph their 'blessed day'. Sadly, we know the reason:  to rub their noses in it.  To humiliate them and if they refuse prosecute and sue for damages.  The KKK used to hold parties where they would force local blacks to serve.  Not because they wanted their service or trusted them, but because they wanted to humiliate them.

Shylock in the Merchant of Venice explained this vengeful motivation hundreds of years ago: 

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that.

So Gays, having (in their view) been mistreated on the marriage issue are determined to punish those that disagree with them for the crime of disagreement.  I think Shylock would have been astonished at such vindictive pettiness.

And once again we've pushed law into places where it ought not go, criminalizing differences in belief and embittering the social landscape.  By this anti-republican arrogance we once again tear at the social bonds which hold our republic together.  If the religious are now subject to legal persecution and coerced service by the irreligious or gay religious for the purpose of humiliating them then why should the religious sustain the state?

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