The most stunning thing about the rush toward Same Sex marriage is the pace of the change. As Douthat points out in the attached article:
" Positions taken by, say, the president of the United States and most
Democratic politicians a few short years ago are now deemed the purest
atavism, the definition of bigotry gets more and more elastic, and
developments that social liberals would have described as right-wing
scare stories in 2002 or so are now treated as just the most natural
extensions of basic American principles. (Rod Dreher calls this the "law of merited impossibility,"
in which various follow-on effects of same-sex marriage are dismissed
as impossible until they happen, at which point it's explained that of
course they were absolutely necessary.)"
So now we look at the issues of Baronelle Stutzman and Indiana's new laws. If these situations had developed even 10 years ago they would have not even been noticed. Nor do I think they should be today. Baronelle Stutzman by anyone's definition is not a bigot. She both hired and provided flowers to openly gay people, had done so for years, and no one is denying that. What she objected to is not gay people, but being asked to PARTICIPATE in an event she considered immoral. She is being asked in defiance of the first amendment, to abrogate the free exercise of her religion and actively participate in something she feels is immoral. A reading of the Indiana law shows the same thing.
Douthat's article takes that same point and moves it further down the slippery slope.It might just be easier to rescind the first amendment since we are going to do so by fiat anyway. Or as Rod Dreher put it, "It's a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of gay rights, and boy, do they deserve what they're going to get."
This post was edited on 3/31 12:25 PM by kscrawler
The slippery slope
" Positions taken by, say, the president of the United States and most
Democratic politicians a few short years ago are now deemed the purest
atavism, the definition of bigotry gets more and more elastic, and
developments that social liberals would have described as right-wing
scare stories in 2002 or so are now treated as just the most natural
extensions of basic American principles. (Rod Dreher calls this the "law of merited impossibility,"
in which various follow-on effects of same-sex marriage are dismissed
as impossible until they happen, at which point it's explained that of
course they were absolutely necessary.)"
So now we look at the issues of Baronelle Stutzman and Indiana's new laws. If these situations had developed even 10 years ago they would have not even been noticed. Nor do I think they should be today. Baronelle Stutzman by anyone's definition is not a bigot. She both hired and provided flowers to openly gay people, had done so for years, and no one is denying that. What she objected to is not gay people, but being asked to PARTICIPATE in an event she considered immoral. She is being asked in defiance of the first amendment, to abrogate the free exercise of her religion and actively participate in something she feels is immoral. A reading of the Indiana law shows the same thing.
Douthat's article takes that same point and moves it further down the slippery slope.It might just be easier to rescind the first amendment since we are going to do so by fiat anyway. Or as Rod Dreher put it, "It's a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of gay rights, and boy, do they deserve what they're going to get."
This post was edited on 3/31 12:25 PM by kscrawler
The slippery slope
