This is an important discussion because Dr. Craig points out the proclivity for principles of special rights that counter equal rights. This podcast from Reasonable Faith (http://www.reasonablefaith.org/) is a great addition to the conversation we ALL should be having.
AGAIN, William Lane Craig does an excellent duty in treading the conservative Evangelical ~ Constitutional viewpoint in discussing Same Sex Marriage.
One should see my post on Christians who are living a chaste life or a changed life because of Christ!
Since marriage is no longer about creating a stable environment for children, and has become (and this mainly the fault of heterosexual liberals) about personal fulfillment, validation, and access to social benefits, there literally is no constraint on how much more broadly it can be redefined.
There were no plans in the works to put a Chick-fil-A on campus. It was the mere possibility, inspired by a survey last month showing that many students want one at JHU, that frightened our special snowflakes into recommending a ban preemptively “in the best interest of a cohesive campus environment in which all students feel accepted.”
“The SGA does not support the proposal of a Chick-fil-A, in a current or future sense, particularly on any location that is central to student life,” states the resolution passed by the student government, which noted “visiting prospective and current students, staff, faculty, and other visitors who are members of the LGBTQ+ community or are allies would be subjected to the microaggression of supporting current or future Chick-fil-A development plans.”…
[J]unior Andrew Guernsey, president of Johns Hopkins University Voice for Life, wrote about the recent decision on National Review, stating: “The JHU student government’s vote this week to ban any hypothetical future Chick-fil-A outlet from campus because of the company owner’s support for traditional marriage … sends a clear message that students who disagree with liberal orthodoxy are not welcome on the Hopkins campus.”…
In remarks delivered to the Student Government Association before its vote, Guernsey said: “In banning Chick-fil-A from campus for its CEO’s views, the JHU student government would also set a dangerous precedent that could be used to give the boot to socially conservative religious groups on campus… The entire notion of keeping the university a ‘safe space,’ free from one side of a debate on hot-button issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, is absolutely antithetical to Johns Hopkins’ stated commitment to the free and robust exchange of ideas.”
Give credit where it’s due: The “microaggression” bit is a brilliant political flourish, exactly the sort of thing that an Orwellian impulse towards purging one’s environment of thoughtcrimes deserves….
Of course, this isn’t really about “microaggressions” (i.e. “things that don’t bother normal people but send neurotic liberals to the fainting couches”), this is about the gay left telling businesses “If you don’t support and celebrate our agenda, we will crush you.”
Because that’s what fascists do.
A Non-Fascist would say, “I don’t like the policies of your company, so I’m not going to eat there.” (Which is why I don’t eat at Buffalo Wild Wings or Sonic, for example.) But a fascist is a different animal entirely. It’s not enough for the fascist to decide not to patronize a business whose policies are disagreeable to him. The fascist has to deny others the choice of using that business as well, and, ideally, punish the business owner for daring to disagree with him.
[Editors Note: Gay Patriot refuses to exchange their wage earned actions with the people at Buffalo Wild Wings, Sonic, Chili’s, Panera, Chipotle, and TGIF because they are against the 2nd-Amendment. In case you were wondering.]
Breitbart notes that discrimination, seemingly, can only be in one direction:
…Last March, Jack went toAzucar Bakeryand requested two cakes to be decorated with biblical messages. “I requested two cakes, each in the shape of an open Bible. On the first cake I requested on one page, ‘God hates sin — Psalm 45:7,’ and on the facing page, ‘Homosexuality is a detestable sin — Leviticus 18:22,’” Jack said.
Jack also said:
On the second cake I requested on one page, “God loves sinners,” and on the facing page, “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us – Romans 5:8.” I also requested a decoration of two groomsmen holding hands with a cross in the background with a ghostbusters symbol over it to illustrate that such a union is unacceptable biblically.
On Good Friday, the Department of Regulatory Agencies handed down its decision that refusing such a request did not constitute discrimination.
Jack has decried what he calls the “hypocrisy” of the decision, after the same department found a Christian baker guilty of discrimination for declining to bake a cake for a gay wedding….
In a conversation on my FaceBook, this question was posed:
Not saying it’s morally right, but isn’t that where people come in, to either purchase goods or not purchase goods from a business?
To which I replied:
Correct. Even below the Constitutional idea of Conscience objections due to religious objections… which the Federal and 20 state laws would make it incumbent on the cake shop owner to show a real religious foundation for their objection [withholding of services] to a specific event. LIKE the federal government allows the person not going to war in a draft because of deeply held religious convictions, they as well have to show the burden of their religious objection…
…there is the Constitutional idea of entering into contractual agreements with your fellow man without the government getting involved. This idea was found in early Christian thinking, grew immensely in Reformational thinking, influenced heavily the Western idea of law, and was a legal foundation to the philosophy that penned our Founding document:
▼ See my bibliography I used for a final paper in a seminary class.
So, the person wanting the service, if they cannot get it through an agreement with “said-shop-a,” there is always “said-shop-b.” If the consensus of the free market works against shop-a, then shop “a” will close due to free market values if they refuse to supply what the people want.
Both videos in a recent post of mine explain this concept of the free-market well. And this article explains a bit the “freedom of contract” in relation to the current issue.
The same issue is hitting across the pond as well. One point that I think goes well with the above idea that discrimination can happen to both the secular and religious person is this, via National Review:
“If supporting same-sex marriage is a protected political opinion, so is supporting traditional marriage,” Simon Calvert, deputy director of the Christian Institute, which is supporting the bakery, told the Telegraph. “Is the commission seriously saying that all business owners have to be willing to promote every political cause or campaign, no matter how much they disagree with it? Does a printer have no right to refuse to print posters for the BNP or Islamic State?”
Here is the discussion between Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service at Chapman University Fowler School of Law, John Eastman, and Dennis Prager about the law in Indiana and the failing American experiment:
In the second hour Dennis ruminates on the first hour and the discussion he had with Professor Eastman:
And as a bonus, I isolated Prager admitting that he was wrong and Barry Goldwater was right:
The above comes with a hat-tip to GayPatriot, who themselves hat-tip both: Weasel Zips and Truth Revolt. Again, GP has me laughing: “Don’t call them Nazis, call them ‘Socialist Totalitarians in Fabulous Uniforms’.”
I recently updated my defining of fascism here, reading that in total will help in understanding why gay men and women call these actions of laws against Christian bakers and photographers as fascism. To wit I wish to put in part here two posts by Gay Patriot and encourage you to click through to finsish the reading.
A pizza shop owner made the mistake of saying publicly that they didn’t care to be forced into catering a gay wedding. The left-wing MFM ginned up a fake story about a pizza shop that refused to cater gay weddings. Within a day, death threats… including a threat of arson from a public school teachers … forced the pizza shop to close.
And the gay left celebrated how effective they have become in their bullying.
[….]
Once it gets decided that certain people can have rights taken away from them by those who have power, violence follows inevitably.
Just imagine, for a second, if a gay-owned business had been forced to close because Christians threatened to burn it down and murder its employees.
The gay left has become the KKK, in 600 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets.
One aspect of the debate over whether Christians and others who don’t support gay marriage should be forced by the State (and threatened with violence) for declining to participate in gay weddings is … what’s the big deal with a wedding cake anyway? To the activist left, declining to bake a cake is no different than a lynching in the Jim Crow south. But does it really cause anyone any real quantifiable harm to send them to a different bakery? Or a different photographer? Or a different florist? Or a different wedding chapel?
If you really believe in liberty, then you have just accept that liberty means that people are going to make choices and do things that you may not agree with. And so long as they are not harming anyone else, they should be allowed to do so.
[….]
Bruised feelings do not rise to the level of actual harm.
Destroying someone’s livelihood through threats of violence —that is actual harm….
Bakers, photographers and florists are being forced to shut down their businesses unless they accede to demands that they join in the celebration of gay “marraiges,” but so far no one has faced jail time for putting commitment to the Word of God ahead of the demands of homosexuals and their cultural champions.
Until now. A couple in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho who own a wedding chapel there declined the request of a gay couple that they perform their “wedding.” They couple did what gay couples seem to do a lot in these situations. They didn’t just go find someone else. They complained to authorities, who are now threatening to throw the pastors in jail. That’s how out of control this has gotten:
The Idaho case involves Donald and Evelyn Knapp, both ordained ministers, who run Hitching Post Wedding Chapel. Officials from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, told the couple that because the city has a non-discrimination statute that includes sexual orientation and gender identity, and because the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Idaho’s constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, the couple would have to officiate at same-sex weddings in their own chapel.
The non-discrimination statute applies to all “public accommodations,” and the city views the chapel as a public accommodation.
On Friday, a same-sex couple asked to be married by the Knapps, and the Knapps politely declined. The Knapps now face a 180-day jail term and $1,000 fine for each day they decline to celebrate the same-sex wedding.
Note how the secular left is trying to create a fascimile of the civil rights movement in turning these pastors into criminals, and doing so very disingenuously….
[….]
The Christian who believes homosexual sex is an abomination in the eyes of God cannot perform a gay wedding ceremony, or take photos of Bob and Gary, or write “Congratulations Anna and Shirley” on a cake without compromising his or her devotion to God. That is not the same thing as making them sandwiches.
The left wants the state to use the notion of “public accommodations” to force business owners to do things that directly violate their faith. The state is complying….
I combine a few pieces from two separate hours of his show. Some calls are included that should help in dialogue by providing some analogies. The calls are from 9:55 to 12:26.
The anti-religious Left mob is in action… from Hillary Clinton to the CEO at Apple to the Governor of Connecticut.
For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/
“We oppose gay adoptions – the only family is the traditional one,” said legendary fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana of Dolce & Gabanna in an interview with Panorama, reported The Telegraph.
Dolce told the Italian magazine that procreation “must be an act of love” and added, “You are born to a mother and a father – or at least that’s how it should be.”
Children born through in vitro fertilization (IVF) “I call children of chemistry, synthetic children,” said Dolce. “Uteruses for rent, semen chosen from a catalog. Psychiatrists are not ready to confront the effects of this experimentation.”
A statement that ordinarily would cause controversy has fanned vitriolic flames, because the pair making this statement are a gay couple who dated for 23 years (and broke up in 2005.)
“I am gay, I cannot have a child. I guess you cannot have everything in life,” Dolce said. “No chemical offspring and rented uterus: life has a natural course, some things cannot be changed. One is the family.”
Gabbana added: “The family is not a fad. In it there is a supernatural sense of belonging.”…
