George Will, appearing on Fox News to discuss recent controversy over gay marriage, calls gay rights advocates “sore winners” and suggests that their efforts to force bakeries and other service providers to accommodate them is “not neighborly”.
Will refers to this as a clash of rights, those being religious freedom versus civil rights. In such a framing, it’s virtually impossible to disagree that the cake should be baked, to boil it down to a specific situation. Public accommodation laws are, as Will says, something that our society as a whole have chosen, and which speaks to our character as a nation. That we stand against intolerance in all forms, even at the cost of a small liberty like denying service in a private business. This all sounds very pretty and nice and makes you feel proud to be an American.
Too bad it has nothing to do with what is actually happening.
When you force a bakery to cater a gay wedding, or a photography studio to photograph one, you are not forcing them to accommodate a person, you are forcing them to participate in an event. You cannot be a bigot against an event. You cannot discriminate against a ceremony. A ceremony, dear friends on the left, is not a person.
If a gay couple walks into a Starbucks and orders a cupcake, by all means give it to them. To not do so would be discriminatory and is the kind of practice our society finds unacceptable. But if that same gay couple comes in to Joe’s Bakery and Photography Hut and demands that Joe attend, photograph, and cater a gay marriage, you are no longer asking him to treat a person as equal. You are instead demanding Joe, perhaps against his religious conviction, to endorse the ceremony. Joe should no more be required to do that than that gay couple should be forced to cater a Klan meeting. I won’t be designing an infographic to convince people to move businesses out of North Carolina, either, to find a mundane, non-religious example. But the fact is, this is religious, whether the left likes it or not.
A person should not be made to participate in an event which the practice of constitutes a violation of their deeply held religious convictions. Should a Muslim be forced to barbecue up some ribs for a pig pickin’? Of course not. Is he discriminating against us rednecks? Of course not.
But this is all too obvious, and those who are pressing to conscript religious objectors into the service of gay marriage know this very well. Because in the end, it’s not merely about getting a cake at a wedding. It is about forcing every single American to stand before the public inquisition and pledge allegiance to the “tolerance” czars, or face punishment.
As Erick Erickson of RedState so often says, “you will be made to care.”