Religious Freedom v. Big Gay

Do you remember Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer? Sure you do, they're the lesbians who sued Aaron and Melissa Klein for refusing to bake them a gay wedding cake and got a whopping $135,000 award from an Oregon court, payable by the Kleins. Happy day for the Cryers, not so fun for the Kleins.

This, and other cases like it, along with the all-too-real prospect of the US Supreme Court ruling that gay marriage is a Constitutional right, has got trads like myself worried. If they'll go for the bakers, we ask ourselves, why not schools, hospitals, charities and churches. 

After all, if opposition to gay marriage is simply a matter of discrimination, it should be banned across the board. Religious freedom, in so many words, does not equal freedom to be bigoted. Albert Mohler calls this the most "serious threat to religious freedom in our time."

I don't think being opposed to gay marriage and saying no to baking cakes for people like Stephen Fry, or the curiously named Cryers, is discrimination, I think it's good sense, grounded in the divinely ordered nature of things. Of course the gay lobby sees otherwise. But the question remains, do orthodox Christians have something to fear from this?

Well, if you're the Kleins, you do. No doubt about it. But what about the churches? Do they risk persecution at the hands of the State? Let's "worst-case" the scenario.

The Archbishop of San Fransissyco is put in jail for anti-gay "hate speech" and Biblically minded pastors around the country are rounded up and put in FEMA death camps, overwatched by DAARPA designed pink drones. In the meanwhile, the churches lose tax-exempt status and go out of business.

Possible? Sure, so was the NSDAP. But not likely, there's too many Christians, with too many votes, to make this realistic, at least for now. And even if it was, the action of the atheist temporal power would galvanize Christians to really practice their faith, as opposed to sitting it out like a pew potato on the occasional Sunday.

With this in mind, the worst case starts to look like a win for Christianity; it'd have to become intentional, and that's no bad thing. After all, the Church was built on the blood of the martyrs, not the yawns of the indifferent. That's the worst case, and it results in a win for traditionalists; the Christian base is mobilized.

There's another possibility, which is more in tune with reality. Most Americans are pretty tolerant, they don't really care if Rachel and Laurel want to say they're married, and if they want the benefits that go with that, all well and good. Knock yourselves out, girls, and don't take the loathsome Rosie O'Donnell as an example.

But in the same breath, the majority of the nation, who want to be fair to the Cryers, also want to be fair to Christians, they don't want to see them hounded out of business and witch-hunted. In brief -- spite, vindictiveness and Gaystapo-Style rulings from the courts don't sit well, at all. And if that continues, with the pink behemoth of intolerance continuing to overplay its hand, there'll be serious push-back. This scenario, too, is a win for traditionalists.

Message to market? Don't be a pew potato, stand up for your faith, prepare for the worst even, get ready to fight back. At the same time, don't be afraid of a mod. viv. with people whose views you disagree with. There doesn't, at this point, have to be a war.

Come And Take It

I hope.

LSP