Dave Blount:
Congealing P.C. tyranny has reached the point that Christians who refuse to participate in blasphemous parodies of holy matrimony may face imprisonment:
A lawsuit filed in Arizona claims a city ordinance forces local artists to use their talents to promote same-sex weddings and does not allow them to express freely their belief that marriage is between one man and one woman.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative, Christian legal organization, filed a pre-enforcement challenge to Phoenix’s city code May 12 for Breanna Koski and Joanna Duka, owners of Brush & Nib Studio based in Phoenix, Arizona.
Koski and Duka, who want to honor God through their art and business, specialize in hand painting, hand lettering and calligraphy for events, like weddings.
Phoenix law “strips artists of their freedom to choose what to create and what to say in the marriage context,” the complaint against the city says. If Koski and Duke were to turn down creating art to celebrate a same-sex marriage, the city could fine them up to $2,500 for each day they violate the law and make them spend six months in jail since their studio creates art for opposite-sex wedding ceremonies, according to the complaint.
“Artists shouldn’t be threatened with jail for disagreeing with the government,” Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, said in astatement.
Once that would have been obvious to any American — but no longer, thanks to the pro-homosexual Culture War blitzkrieg.
A security guard has been arrested for kicking a man out of a ladies bathroom in the supermarket where she worked.
Arrested.
Jettison all your own personal values and principles and accept what the left wants to impose on you… or else.
This is why local and state elections matter.
But refusing to perform a concert because you disagree with others believe is fine.
Every year, more countries adopt same-sex marriage.
Not one country has ever ended same-sex marriage once it had been adopted.
Every year there are more people worldwide who support the right of same-sex marriage and fewer who oppose it, and support for it in America continues to grow rapidly.
With ever-increasing public support for gay rights, how long do you think that the “religious freedom” right to discriminate against gay people will survive?
Ten years?
Maybe… maybe not.
Hatred of people who are “different” will always exist, but the right to publically discriminate is subject to termination at the whim of courts, legislatures and constitutional amendment.
The trends listed above suggest that there will come a time in our future when the present flirtation with “religious freedom” perishes.
@George Wells: Forcing participation in a ceremony that is to be a hallmark of your life seems to make no sense at all.
Hatred is so misused by the left to better reflect them in a victim position. America is tiring of victims everyone is a victim needs a safe space.
Somewhere somebody got the idea they have a right not to be offended, I find that offensive.
Marriage definition is not in the constitution as a federal enumerated power, what ever decision they make is unconstitutional. (so is much of what they do)
Artists Threatened With Jail Time if They Don’t Serve Gay Weddings
Right. Except when I read the article, I discovered that nobody has actually threatened the idiots with anything. The lawsuit is because of a hypothetical scenario somebody imagines could happen.
And as if that weren’t stupid enough, it turns out that as of the date of the article no such lawsuit had even been filed. So that’s also hypothetical.
But go ahead and get all worked up about the government again, trying to destroy the family and to make people gay and to let perverts into little girls’ restrooms. Getting people worked up over nothing is what about 90 percent of crap like this is about. It’s how you turn people out at the polls and trick them into voting against their own best interests. You certainly can’t have people talking and thinking about substantive issues.
@Greg: Meanwhile, you can pretend you don’t see the lies, corruption and fascist tendencies of the left. Now THAT’S stupid.
@kitt #6:
Nothing in my #5 ADVOCATES forcing anyone to do anything against their will.
In case you missed it, the entire post is nothing more than a prediction that is based upon the trends over the past twenty years.
You can draw the line through the points and extend it into the future yourself, and you can see where it is headed as well as I can.
I’m not saying any of it is right, I’m just drawing attention to what SHOULD be obvious to you and anyone else who bothers to stop screaming long enough to think about what is actually happening.
Rights that we THINK are immutable happen to come and go from time to time, and while it IS possible that the right to same-sex marriage might be invalidated at some point in the future, it is ALSO possible that the right to discriminate against gay people on the grounds of “religious freedom” might also evaporate.
The only thing that is certain is that everyone will never be happy at the same time.
@George Wells: Just a rail over the use of the word Hatred I think its used to the point of non meaning is all.
@Bill, #8:
Maybe you should look over a fascist check list. Of course if someone has been encouraged to engage in projection, it probably won’t help in the least.
Everything I pointed out about the article in question is accurate. It’s an imaginary scenario. It’s like something you’d see acted out on a reality television show. Maybe we can resolve the matter once and for all on a reality television court show.
@George Wells:
Where IS this discrimination? Is this what you call a right NOT to be involved in something you might not want to be involved in?
What I hate is the fall-back tactic of declaring that any time someone disagrees with an ideology, it HAS to be due to hatred. I do not agree with Baptist’s ideas about alcohol and dancing. I don’t want to be a part of the Catholic church and all that ceremony. I don’t agree with the Mormon view of life and religion. But I don’t hate any of them, though if any of them decided I needed to be FORCED to agree with them and participate in their rituals, I could probably learn.
@Greg: One item on the list is to use force and violence to shut down opposing discussion, something you, by your choices, apparently endorse. You are also obviously in favor of the use of the power of the government to attack political opponents. You must LOVE the state controlled media lying to the public and keeping government failures hidden or distorted.
@Bill #12 :
OK, Bill, maybe YOU don’t equate the protections sought in the name of “religious freedom” with “discrimination,” but a whole lot of people DO, and their numbers are growing exponentially. Much more importantly, they are WINNING their legal battles, and those who think as you do are not.
Personally, I don’t find a problem with carving out exceptions to legal non-discrimination provisions based on religious belief, but I’m apparently in a minority on this, the same as you are, regardless of whether or not you want to call those exceptions “discrimination.” You are fiddling with word games about what “discrimination” and “hatred” mean while the Rome of “political correctness” burns your personal vision of the US Constitution to the ground.
In spite of having dominated voter representation in state and national legislatures, Republicans have consistently lagged national sentiment on gay rights, and their opponents have waged an increasingly effective cultural war against them as a result.
Use whatever pejoratives you like to make yourself feel better, but your detachment from the public conscience in the gay rights arena marginalizes your political effectiveness and proves the absurdity of it being “better to be right and lose than to win being wrong.” That’s a good epitaph for a political tombstone, and nothing more.
@kitt #10:
Your “rail” is pointless.
If you eliminate the words “hatred,” bigotry,” and “discrimination” (Bill evidently doesn’t see any anti-gay discrimination anywhere) then the vocabulary you are left with is but so much mush. In spite of the efforts of the PC crowd to neuter our emotions (or at least our verbal expression of them), we remain an emotionally violent species. Out words need to express this accurately, and watered-down half-truths don’t cut it.
If you find yourself becoming numb to politically charged rhetoric, take a few days off to read nothing but 19th-century poetry.
@George Wells: There is no “right” to force someone to bake a cake. There is no “right” to alternately use whatever bathroom you feel like, from day to day. There is no “right” to invade other people’s safety and privacy.
@Bill #16:
They say that the only two things that are certain in life are death and taxes, and I would suggest that even taxes are not certain.
In this same context, “rights” are also not certain. They come and go as the people who dream them up change their minds or die off and get replaced in their positions of right-determining power by younger people who have different ideas about what rights everyone else should have.
Secular law – that muddled body of rules that guide the police who pull you over or the judge who decides your court battle – is what determines the “rights” that matter to you while you are here on Earth. If your “there is no “right”” rant is referring to GOD’S “rules,” that doesn’t really matter now, does it? You can’t take those sort of rules to a court and hope to gain any traction with them.
The “rights” that you claim do not exist either exist or don’t exist at the whim of the people who define our rights, and we have abundant proof that the minds that set such rights tend to change with time. We see that in profuse evidence right now. A decade or so ago, the right of same-sex marriage did not exist ANYWHERE, and yet today, it exists here in the United States and in a growing number of other countries. It’s coming next to Mexico and Australia, having reached Ireland and Colombia last year.
You or I can make the argument that a “fundamental” (God-given) right to same-sex marriage ALWAYS existed but was wrongly prevented by bad Law, or equally we can argue that such a “fundamental” (God-given) right NEVER existed and that one was WRONGLY “created” by bad Law, but either way, the practical effect is indistinguishable. The “right” to same-sex marriage now “exists” and is being lawfully exercised by millions of people to the great economic advantage of some and to the considerable disadvantage of others.
This same vagueness over the concept of “religious freedom” exists for the same reason, and that reason turns on the fact that the people who determine THAT right have not definitively weighed in on it in over a decade. Just as the right to same-sex marriage was in dramatic flux for about ten years, so will the rights of religious freedom undergo a period of transition. (This is prediction, not advocacy, so don’t get your tits in an uproar.)
The trends in political correctness – trends that I disagree with – indicate that religious freedom protections will be severely curtailed in the coming decade. The “rights” that you claim do not exist will become more and more firmly entrenched in our culture as legitimate rights in spite of your objection. Then, whether you acknowledge them or not, for all practical purposes they WILL exist, as people exercise them and as they win court battles against people who would deny them those rights.
You can continue to ignore the obvious progress of gay rights if you choose, but be reminded that “ignore” is the root of “ignorance.”
As you leave, don’t let the door knob hit you where the Good Lord split you.
What you are discussing here deserves to be called by its name:
CREEDS.
Various Christian CREEDS take different tacks with regards all sorts of things.
Discrimination?
Perhaps.
Protections sought in the name of “religious freedom?”
Absolutely.
I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another’s creed. – Thomas Jefferson.
But it is exactly that which is what the Left’s jihad against the family is trying to do.
Refuse to make a wedding cake?
Homophobe!
Refuse to let men in your daughter’s locker room?
Bigot!
But creeds do exactly that.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/creed
Discriminate because of various religious tenets.
And our founders wanted us to continue to be able to do precisely that.
@Nanny G #18:
“Discriminate because of various religious tenets.
And our founders wanted us to continue to be able to do precisely that.”
Thank you for that, Nanny G. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
But there is exactly one problem that you failed to note.
If you turn the two lines of yours that I copied above AROUND, you can find all the justification you could possibly want to discriminate AGAINST religious tenets.
Discrimination works equally in both directions.
And at this point in time, religious people are getting screwed.
“And our founders wanted us to continue to be able to do precisely that.”
How did you miss that?