I had a really tough decision Monday night about what to write about for Tuesday’s post. I wanted to say something about the sexting and resume misrepresentation accusations against Ravi Zacharias. I also wanted to say something about the how the Democrats in the DOJ and the FBI protected Hillary Clinton from criminal charges while inventing a fake Russia-Trump connection. I wanted to say something about how the Supreme Court just allowed full enforcement of the Trump security measures against countries that are significantly influenced by radical Islamic terrorism. In the end, I chose the Supreme Court story, because it relates to free speech and freedom of association
There’s a good little video summary of the case here:
Ben Shapiro posted a great summary of what you need to know about the case at the Daily Wire:
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is slated to hear oral argument in the famed Masterpiece Cakeshop case. The case is a seminal one for religious liberty. It pits the ability of local and state governments to enforce “anti-discrimination law” against religious practice rights for businessowners; it essentially decides whether or not religious people can practice their religion in their business. This goes to the heart of freedom of religion in the United States.
The case revolves around a man named Jack Phillips. Jack is a baker. He makes and decorates cakes. He has a simple rule: he’ll sell anyone a cake. Gay, straight, transgender, green. Anyone. But he won’t make a custom cake for every event. As a religious Christian, this means that he sees it as sinful participation to make a custom cake celebrating a same-sex wedding. So he’ll make a cake for a same-sex wedding, but he won’t decorate it as such (no groom-groom wedding toppers, for example). He also refuses to make cakes that push anti-gay messages, anti-American messages, and adult-themed messages.
That’s his Constitutional right. But the Leftists at the Colorado Civil Rights Commission didn’t think so. They think that Jack must be forced to violate his own religious beliefs and decorate a cake for a same-sex wedding, or stop making any cakes at all. As a result of their ruling, Jack lost 40% of his business and more than half of his employees — all for abiding by his Biblical beliefs in the most tolerant possible way. He was even told that he had to re-educate employees, including his family members, and report to the government what his artistic decisions were, listing all the cakes he’d failed to bake and why.
Now, I know lots of people who claim to be Christians who support redefining marriage to eliminate the requirement of complementary sexes. I wonder how they would explain their support for SSM given this clear case of fascism by a secular government? Before this country redefined marriage, people on the right warned that there would be consequences for religious liberty.
Sometimes, it’s nice to read what is really happening in the world, with the politically correct spin removed.
Try this:
But this isn’t a religious case at all. It’s a freedom of association and freedom of speech case. Religious practice shouldn’t be bound to the home or church — religious life infuses every aspect of living. But by the same token, an atheist should be free to reject a Christ-themed cake, a Leftist speechwriter should be free to reject a right-wing politician, and The New Republic should be free to refuse to deliver to the Trump White House. Does this mean that people we dislike will be able to act in ways we dislike? Absolutely. But freedom lives in the spaces where we acknowledge that we have no right to another’s labor or approval. Tyranny grows when we refuse to acknowledge those spaces.
What’s really going on here is that there is a group of people involved in sinful, self-destructive activities. And their response to their own bad feelings about what they’re freely choosing to do is to try to generate happy feelings by forcing everyone around them to celebrate their decisions. You would never see a chaste person suing unchaste people to demand their approval. That’s because chastity is self-evidently virtuous. No outside celebration or affirmation is wanted or needed. But sinful people become obsessed with shutting out purity. And if they can’t shut it out, then they use the law to stamp it out.
That’s what this Supreme Court case is really about. We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that people on the secular left are Americans in any sense of the word. They don’t accept the Constitution, they don’t accept free speech, they don’t accept freedom of association, they don’t accept religious liberty. They accept their sexual desires. And the human rights of everyone else in the world has to give way to their sexual desires.
The loss of liberty for Bible-believing Christians isn’t a problem for fake Christians who think Christianity is about feeling good and being liked. It’s only a problem for people who actually do have a relationship with God in Christ. And that’s a very small minority of people who profess Christianity.
For a more thorough take on the legal aspects of the case, you can check out this editorial by Robbie George in the radical leftist New York Times, of all places.
