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“Religious Right Cheers a Bill Allowing Refusal to Serve Gays.”
Thus did the New York Times’ headline, leaving no doubt as to who the black hats are, describe the proposed Arizona law to permit businesses, on religious grounds, to deny service to same-sex couples.
Examples of intolerance provided by the Times:
“In New Mexico, a photographer declined to take pictures of a lesbian couple’s commitment ceremony. In Washington State, a florist would not provide flowers for a same-sex wedding. And in Colorado, a baker refused to make a cake for a party celebrating the wedding of two men.”
The question Gov. Jan Brewer faces?
Should Christians, Muslims, Mormons who refuse, on religious grounds, to serve same-sex couples — that photographer, that florist, that baker, for example — be treated as criminals?
Or should Arizona leave them alone?
“Religious freedom,” said Daniel Mach of the ACLU to the Times, is “not a blank check to … impose our faith on our neighbors.”
True. But who is imposing whose beliefs here?
The baker who says he’s not making your wedding cake? Or those who want Arizona law to declare that either he provides that wedding cake and those flowers for that same-sex ceremony, or we see to it that he is arrested, prosecuted and put out of business?
Who is imposing his views and values here?
What we are seeing in Arizona in microcosm is what we have witnessed in America for half a century: the growing intolerance of those who preach tolerance and the corruption of the concept of civil rights.
We have seen the progression before.
In 1954, the Supreme Court declared that segregation in public schools was wrong and every black child must be allowed to attend his or her neighborhood school. By 1968, the court was demanding that white children be forcibly bussed across entire cities to insure an arbitrary racial balance.
Under the civil rights acts of the 1960s, businesses were told that in hiring, promotion, pay, and benefits, black and white, men and women must be treated alike. Equality of opportunity.
But, soon, that was no longer enough. We needed equality of result.
Corporations were ordered to maintain extensive records of the race, gender, ethnicity and sexual preferences of their entire work force to prove they were not guilty of discrimination.
And if your work force is insufficiently diverse today, you are a citizen under suspicion in a country we used to call the Land of the Free.
Consider how far we have come.
Virtually all decisions to hire, fire, promote or punish employees, to oversee the sale and rental of housing, to ensure that all minorities have access to all restaurants, hotels and motels, are under the jurisdiction of these minions who are right out of Orwell’s “1984.”
Scores of thousands of bureaucrats — academic, corporate, government — are on watch, overseeing our economy, patrolling our society, monitoring our behavior.
A radical idea: Suppose we repealed the civil rights laws and fired all the bureaucrats enforcing these laws.
Does anyone think hotels, motels and restaurants across Dixie, from D.C. to Texas, would stop serving black customers? Does anyone think there would again be signs sprouting up reading “whites” and “colored” on drinking foundations and restrooms?
Does anyone think restrictive covenants against Jews would be rewritten into contracts on houses? Does anything think that bars and hotels would stop serving blacks and Hispanics?
In his indictment of George III, Jefferson wrote of the king: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”
Is that not what we have today in spades?
Why do we need this vast army of bureaucrats?
They exist to validate the slander that America is a racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic country which would revert to massive discrimination were it not for heroic progressives standing guard.
And, indeed, some bigots might revert to type. But so what?
Cannot a free people deal with social misconduct with social sanctions?
And isn’t this what freedom is all about? The freedom of others to say things we disagree with, to publish ideas we disbelieve in, even to engage in behavior we dislike?
As for the Christians of Arizona and same-sex unions in Arizona, if they don’t like each other, can they not just avoid each other? After all, it’s a big state.
Why will we not see the lapsing or repeal of civil rights laws whose work is done? That would mean cracking the rice bowls of hundreds of thousands of diversicrats who would then have to apply for jobs from folks they have spent their lives harassing.
Last year, the Supreme Court struck down the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet, somehow, Mississippi still has more black elected officials than any other state.
If the conditions that called for the laws of the 1960s have ceased to exist, why do those laws still exist?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”
Copyright 2014 Creators.com.
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See it this way.
Freedom of speech is legal.
So, a swastika sign is legal as long as it’s not used for vandalism. So, if I go to a Jewish baker and order a cake with a swastika and ‘heil Hitler’, should he be forced bake the cake? Would his refusal to do so a violation of my free speech rights?
Holocaust denial is protected under American law. So, can I go to a Jewish publisher and demand that he publish a holocaust denial book? If he doesn’t, should he be sued for violating free speech rights?
Th issue here is not about refusing to serve homos. The issue is the refusal to serve immoral requests made by homos. If a bakery said ‘no homos allowed’, that would be wrong. But surely a bakery has a right not to bend over to immoral requests made by homos.
It’s like a film studio has the right to reject certain offers and proposals.
Surely a Palestinian baker should have the right to refuse to bake a pro-Zionist cake.
And a homo baker has a right to refuse to bake a ‘God hates fags’ cake even though American laws protects one’s right to believe that God indeed hates homos.
I think it’s a huge mistake to conflate the civil rights movement that finally accomplished peacefully what war had failed to do in 1865 for African-Americans, with the push for homosexual “marriage.” Obviously homosexualists who are selling that bill of goods see it as useful.
We live in an age of libertinism, confused with liberty. Libertinism always precedes the rise of authoritarianism. Think Weimar for a late example. Right now, the assault on the Bill of Rights has never been greater, yet “gay marriage” rights are a bigger obsession than the real destruction of liberty imposed by a massive domestic spying system of secret government, a turnkey totalitarian tool turned inwards against the American people. The supporters of this domestic inquisition have no problem with homosexual “marriage,” however. This makes for what seems to be strange political bedfellows who simultaneously advocate the remote control assassinations of foreigners in their own countries under the rubric of undeclared pre-emptive forever wars.
Homosexualists – that is, the propagandists and agitators – have so much lingering doubt and lack of confidence in the precepts about marriage they are trying to convince themselves of as well as others, that they crave not just benign acceptance but the positive affirmation and celebration of dubious choices, coerced from others. If they get enough of it, they think, maybe they will expiate any remaining doubt or guilt they harbor that they think was imposed on them. But if they still feel that way, no matter how much praise is demanded as recompense, yet more will be demanded to “prove” they are right.
The ladies and men doth protest too much.
And it is easy to see their own subjection to compulsions and their readiness to demand obedience in celebration of it from others, forcing others to violate their own consciences, are consistent with draconian authoritarianism, a hierarchy of domination.
I am surprised of such a superficial article. Really surprised. Not even good for a young student. The concept of freedom is distorted on purpose.
In the end the whole article seems to be supporting that freedom means the ability of somebody to harm/harass/discriminate/insult somebody else.
I have been grown with a very simple concept, which seems to be lacking in the author: “Freedom is not absolute. It ends where somebody else freedom begins”.
Anybody with a little brain should understand it.
What should make readers think is that US needs an army of bureaucrats to enforce freedom against racism, intolerance, religious extremism. That means US people are intolerant, religious fanatics and racists. otherwise there would be no need for all those bureaucrats. Thank God they are there.
Any commercial activity is providing a public service under license of local/regional/state authorities. That’s why they are not allowed to discriminate and their refusal to serve anybody should involve the revoke of their authorization.