Gay marriage and liberty: on the slippery slope
A law protecting the rights of vendors to refuse to provide services to same sex-couples in the context of marrying or celebrating their marriages was passed in the Kansas House and killed in the Kansas Senate. So it’s now moot, at least for Kansas, which doesn’t allow gay marriage anyway but was intent on protecting such vendors from lawsuits.
But the debate around the bill reveals something that those familiar with the left and gay marriage activists’ m.o. already knew: that gay marriage was only the start, and the intent was always to force people not only to allow it in the legal sense but to fully accept it in every sense, whatever their religious beliefs may be.
I’ve skimmed quite a few articles in the MSM about the bill, and all of them so far have had headlines and ledes that have mischaracterized it, always in the same way. A USA Today piece by Kirsten Powers is typical of the genre. Headlined “Jim Crow laws for gays and lesbians?”, it says that the Kansas statute is a “bill protecting the religious freedom of businesses and individuals to refuse services to same-sex couples.” No, not across the board; the bill only applies to a refusal of services around the celebration of same-sex marriages.
Powers’ column at least goes on to speak mostly of marriage, although she never clarifies that the bill is limited to those services. She also confuses the fact that Christians may indeed choose to help perform or service the marriage of gay people with the fact that they should not be compelled by law to do so.
Also typical is this one from CNN, which begins this way:
Denying services to same-sex couples may soon become legal in Kansas.
House Bill 2453 explicitly protects religious individuals, groups and businesses that refuse services to same-sex couples, particularly those looking to tie the knot.
No, not particularly those looking to tie the knot. Only those looking to tie the knot. That’s a big, big difference.
The following was the wording of the bill, which occurs way way down towards the end of the lengthy CNN article, down where most people will not be reading it:
No individual or religious entity shall be required by any governmental entity to do any of the following, if it would be contrary to the sincerely held religious beliefs of the individual or religious entity regarding sex or gender:
“Provide any services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges; provide counseling, adoption, foster care and other social services; or provide employment or employment benefits, related to, or related to the celebration of, any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement.”
Anyone who turns away a gay couple not only can’t face a civil suit, but if anyone tries to sue, they could get nailed with the other side’s legal fees.
There are some small concession in the bill to gay couples.
If an employee at a nonreligious or government business refuses to serve a gay or lesbian couple for religious reasons, the manager is obligated to find another employee who will oblige.
It also explicitly says that the law does not authorize discrimination against anyone, including clergy, who performs or supports same-sex unions.
This, of course, is not analogous to refusing to serve a person because of his/her race or even because of his/her sexual orientation, although those are the analogies from the same-sex marriage lobby.
Christian belief does posit marriage as being between a man and a woman, and has for millennia, as has Western society as a whole. Until a few years ago very few people questioned that.
I’ve written before that I personally have no problem with gay people marrying. But I have a huge problem with compelling Christians to be part of such celebrations or face lawsuits or the loss of their businesses. And I have a huge problem with propaganda that misrepresents what those who oppose gay marriage are suggesting and why. But such propaganda doesn’t surprise me in the least, nor should it surprise anyone else.
About a year ago I wrote, in a lengthy piece about gay marriage:
I’m not personally a follower of a religion or religious subdivision that still subscribes to such beliefs in the literal sense. But I respect religious people and think I understand the reasons for their objections to same sex marriage. I believe that…SSM [same-sex marriage] is merely one step in a long “progressive” march towards the eradication of religion and/or its demonization (a word that has an ironic twist in this context, does it not?).
I see absolutely no reason to change my mind.
They don’t like marriage because cults have their form of legitimate marriage.
We live in California and at least 7 years ago my now 29 year old son said with regard to the gay community that the road from “just don’t berate us, or deny our employment, etc.” sure became “you will accept us on our terms, or else”, FAST! These people have written the book on going after those that see things differently, employing all kinds of methods that they formerly decried unjust.
The eradication of religion will require the eradication of humanity – and we know that the Left will do this when they can. So we know the nature of the enemy facing us. They are best called the Orcs from Mordor and leave it at that. It is what they are. Defeating them is another matter.
For the Left it is never about what they say it is about. It is always and only about power, and control, and bullying and harming. Again, it’s what they are.
Here’s a prediction: Gays, unleashed, will prove to be the most vicious soldiers of their vanguard. Give them but the power and they will explode in rage against the ages and in the name of justice they will trample justice like has never been seen.
Don’t doubt it: Not only will people be forced to accept the so-called “gay agenda”; children will be “educated” into the things in ways one cannot even mention. For their own good of course.
It’s happened before. I think the ancient Greeks had something to say on the matter, and other peoples and places I’m sure.
Yes. I was a liberal Democrat. In 1992, I could not abide a sexual predator like Bill Clinton so I became an Independent. In 2004, I became aware of what was being done to my country and realized that if good people do nothing, evil would triumph. So….. I became a Republican activist (at least they pay lip service to what I believe in). I also joined the American Legion (veteran) and joined a Baptist church (Christian).
It’s time to stand up. Or else we WILL loose our republic.
Regards
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
I have a lifetime friend who is a leftist and she’s all for ruining businesses and people who opt out of jobs celebrating gay marriage. She’s a writer, so I asked her, “So if the KKK or an anti-gay group came to you and asked you to use your time and talent to develop marketing materials for them, you think it would be reasonable for the government to force you to take the job or ruin your ability to make a living?” Total silence on the other end. She never did respond.
It’s SOP: Normalize your client and stigmatize the (once normal) other.
It’s also SOP for them to use the slippery slope – the slope is only slippery because they’re lubricating the way and shoving the ‘progress’ along – while strictly policing the risk of a slippery slope for the other side.
They won’t compromise. The strictly impose their narrative, which is narrow and rigid. The narrative cleanly replaces any conflicting nuances in the truth such as you point out. Their goal is not truth as it is, but to construct truth as it ought to be. Their demands are unconditional.
To reify their preferred truth, they understand the Marxist-method activist game and play it properly. As long as their competitors lag on playing the game properly – when it’s the only social-political game there is – they will hold the advantage.
It is always “We gave an inch and they took a mile. Bwaaahhh.”
And if you don’t give an inch? They define you as evil.
There is only one answer. Don’t surrender, ever, that first inch, and when denounced, denounce right back in double spades.
Look at “hate crimes”.Where’d those come from, and who agreed they should be so defined? Well, murder is murder; murdering a f-g or a black is a worse crime?? An inch was given and those crimes are now a standard part of the criminal code.
You don’t live in a free country anymore.
After they have for years waged war on what they call “essentialism” as part of a strategy for ideologically “normalizing” homosexual behavior, as indeed they have; those who’ve done so, eventually bump into the realization that the same deconstructive operation they have performed on traditional concepts of human-being, eventually works its way all the way down to them personally.
Logically speaking, their claims to consideration as members of any given class are susceptible of being eaten away by the same anti-natural kinds acids they have thrown at the traditionalists and their concepts of what it is to be a particular thing or not, or normal or not … or even healthy or not. After all, “health” is a teleological concept itself.
Once you have denied the reality of universals, or taken the stance that nothing logically follows in the way of a value from a fact, you – as say, a homosexual advocate – have nothing objective to pin your own claims to acceptance on.
So, you say, “No norms, no natural kinds, no teleological framework for interpretation of outcomes …” OK. So what the f++k are you bothering me for?
What is left to the appellant?
Nothing. Nothing except appeals to emotion that is; appeals driven by a desire for benefits which inclusion in a particular solidarity circle might bring him: whether he really is a member or not, shares the same interests or not, or even believes in the predicate which forms, or formed, the basis for the system of association and support, or not.
And if those who hear his appeals are unaffected emotionally (if that is not a redundancy) and look upon his claim as being a substantively bankrupt appeal to markings on scraps of paper he otherwise scorns, then he, as a homosexual advocate, has a logic problem.
Which is why they resort to what are fundamentally emotive arguments. And why any practical level of indifference, even social, becomes so critical for them. It is not political tolerance they really seek but a substantive cost sharing inclusion, and a governmentally mandated access to your life.
As some liberals have previously said in saying more than they knew: Government: it’s the only thing we have in common.
Yes. Not even interests, I’m afraid.
We can already see where the slippery slope is heading since the LGB movement started including T to their name. Now Facebook has enlarged it to 53. And with its enlargement, the movement has started trying to make parents feel guilty about imposing a gender on their child. They are reaching into the schools with the toilets and locker room issue.
Had gays accepted the civil union idea and gone on to show how stable gay relationships were good for society as a whole, they would have had more support. But when I started hearing about Spain using Parent 1 and Parent 2 on birth certificates, I realized that the movement hates all the preserved and/or evolved norms of our civilization, including those based on biological reality. I no longer trust anyone aligned with this movement.
The Lavender Mafia has a new motto: “Live and Let Die.”
Funny how they never have the stones to go after the Moslems.
Gay marriage, liberty and the resulting intersection of a slippery slope, must be viewed within the context of gay marriage’s advocates. Which consist of three broad categories; the hard core left, gays and liberal supporters of gay ‘rights’.
I have long been of the opinion that acceptance of same-sex ‘marriage’ is not the goal but the tactic employed to gain and enforce societal acceptance of whatever ‘definition’ of sexual ‘orientation’ the individual declares valid. That is why it is the LGBT ‘community’ and not the homosexual community.
Liberal supporters of gay ‘rights’ do so out of misguided sympathy, compassion and a point of view that discounts reason and logic in favor of feelings of self-worth.
But it is the hard core left who as always is motivated by cynical considerations. The hard core left does not care about considerations of individual conscience. The hard core left does not believe in individual liberty. The hard core left are totalitarians and like all totalitarians they believe that the end justifies whatever means are necessary to achieve that end.
They only care for the advancement of their totalitarian ideology, which posits that, like dogs, all men are trainable, if trained from birth. Mankind can be and must be made in a new mold, subservient to the State. That has ever been the goal because that is the logical conclusion of the premises, of the ideology they advocate.
Mankind is to be assimilated and made part of the collective. An elite directing and fully controlling the hive is ever the end sought, whatever the tenets of a particular totalitarian ideology.
Mike says, “Gays, unleashed, will prove to be the most vicious soldiers of their vanguard.”
If that should come to pass they might find it wise to study the fate of Rohm and other homosexuals during the Night of the Long Knives.
Favorite rhetorical trick to conflate civil marriage with a religion’s marriage ceremony. Any moron knows they are not the same thing. But it seems to be working.
This issue is lost due to Tony Kennedy. We will have polygamy in ten years.
And no one really knows the full consequences. I nearly puked when I read the federal judges’ opinions from the VA and UT cases where they both dismiss in a few words that there is *no rational reason* to keep marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years.
Let that arrogance sink in and realize we are ruled by tyrants in black robes who are really politicians.
That idiot either doesn’t have the first clue about what Jim Crow laws were, or else she’s deliberately obfuscating.
Jim Crow laws were laws which made segregation and discrimination mandatory. Neither black nor white individuals had a say in the matter. What do you suppose would have happened to a white lunch counter owner who freely chose to serve blacks in 1930s Mississippi? He would have been lucky if his business didn’t get torched.
Contrast that with a business owner who freely chooses who he prefers to do business with. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: There is absolutely nothing wrong with private discrimination. It’s called “freedom of choice”.
Current antidiscrimination laws run roughshod over individual liberty, freedom of choice, and private property rights.
rickl:
Phrases such as “Jim Crow laws” have lost all meaning except “Laws that I think discriminate in ways I don’t like.” The niceties of what those laws were and how they differ from these laws comprise the sort of fuzzy thinking that serve the liberal cause well.
Expat says,
Evolved norms based on “Biological tyranny”, or “illusion” you mean. Or would mean if they had their way.
So assume the proposition: either a “tyranny” or an “illusion”. On that basis one either must have some standard for evaluating a state of affairs as “unjust” and hence a tyranny; or, be able to say what is not illusory about the phenomenon one encounters; i.e. the biological state of affairs.
But what need have the progressives for logic? It just gets in the way; for rationality is itself hegemonic, or so we are told.
Yeah, those of us who believe that this is trending toward anything other than an impulse on the part of progressives to programmatically “evolve” us right out of human-being as we have known it, in order to accommodate, to self-sacrifice for, and to celebrate, for some inscrutable reason, the, per their own progressive definitions, the ultimately pointless impulses of these atypical persons, are sadly and naively mistaken.
Whether realized or even capable of realization or not, their plans are bigger and more far reaching than we would wearily like to admit.
This is neither a brilliant nor a harebrained deduction on my part, but merely a recognition of what so many from Shulamith Firestone, to the transhumanists, and even Peter Singer types have been plainly pushing for.
Neo probably quoted this sometime ago, but it bears repeating:
The Atlantic
Then there’s the Philip Allott school of “legal thinking”
Parker…
It doesn’t fit the traditional story…
But it has finally come out that the British Army captured one of Adolfs personal guard detail (SS) who was stationed at the Eagle’s Nest.
His tale was shocking — and suppressed all these years.
1) Hitler didn’t want his guards to be seen in any family photos. So they were trained to be invisible — hiding just right around the corner. All of those ‘family films’ showing the dictator’s private moments are being shot while the place is crawling with hidden SS guards.
2) Hitler didn’t want his guards to discuss — in ANY way — his private sex life. Since he was in the final stages of syphilis — he was impotent. Consequently, this bodyguard was staffed entirely with gay SS troops. This included the interrogatee. They had to be handsome, too. In effect, staffed entirely by male models.
Hitler felt that they wouldn’t engage in any pillow talk that wouldn’t be quickly piped back up to him. Whereas, boys will talk to girls — especially about all of the juicy personal tid-bits that are sure to arise at the Eagle’s Nest.
Obviously, this tale dovetails with the SA and its leadership. Adolf had ZERO problems with gays. He just didn’t like liberal gays — and flamingly gay liberal men. As long as Ernst Ré¶hm kept a lid on it, the despot had no qualms at all.
BTW, until the night of the long knives, Himmler was Ré¶hm’s subordinate! The idea that Adolf was unaware of Ernst Ré¶hm’s tastes in buddies is too absurd to mute.
The flip side was true: he was absolutely paranoid that his own sexual difficulties might ever become public. This is why having a cute — but slow of wit — Eva Braun met his image requirements entirely.
(How dumb? She stayed in the bunker! That takes the cake.)
(How dumb? She stayed in the bunker! That takes the cake.)
Dumb yes, but just before they committed suicide, Adolf did marry Eva, so perhaps the cyanide pills tasted bitter and a bit sweet.
Joni Mitchell: http://tinyurl.com/7mhdywu
Less than 10 years, Cornhead. The first lawsuits have already been filed — in Utah, of all places. I can’t wait for the first federal judge to rule that the act under which Utah was admitted to the Union was unconstitutional since it required the state to ban polygamy.
And, the first shot in the next battle has already been fired — Salon, or Slate, I forget which, published its first article on why incest shouldn’t be prohibited.
This is about evolutionary fitness first, and morality second. Religion is a distraction from the main issue, which people without a rational argument have desperately adopted. This is the same failure that pro-abortion/choice advocates have experienced when they attempt to rationalize premeditated murder of wholly innocent human lives with a faith-based article of spontaneous conception. They think that the voluntary nature of their population control protocol is a significant difference from the coercion practiced by their counterparts, but they are wrong. They are guilty of committing human rights violations on an unprecedented scale.
While there was cause to normalize heterosexual relationships between one man and one woman, there is no legitimate justification to normalize homosexual behavior, which has no redeeming value to society or humanity. However, now that it has been normalized, then all previously tolerated behaviors, including other dysfunctional behaviors, must also be normalized. As it is, the advocates for homosexual couplets are guilty of arbitrary discrimination against other relationships and associations by quantity, quality, and character. They have followed the moral low road and it should not escape scrutiny.
Welcome to the Dodo Dynasty, where money, sex, ego, and convenience are offered as inducements for minority fitness.
Richard Saunders:
Now that homosexual behavior has been normalized, then every dysfunctional behavior must also be normalized. With the normalization of homosexual behavior, there are no longer any legitimate arguments to oppose normalizing dysfunctional behaviors including incestuous relationships. With elective abortion, the progress of freakish clumps of cells and genetic corruption is no longer a concern. With rejection of evolutionary fitness, the viability of Homo sapiens is no longer a concern.
Actually, with the normalization of elective abortion (i.e. premeditated murder without cause or due process), not even murder can escape normalization, other than through a strong self-defense. When and by whose determination does a human life acquire value? Is it the mother’s choice? Is it the state’s choice?
The Left’s war continues on. Meanwhile, in other news…
Hey would you mind letting me know which web host you’re
utilizing? I’ve loaded your blog in 3 completely different web browsers and I must say this blog
loads a lot quicker then most. Can you suggest a good web hosting
provider at a reasonable price? Thank you, I appreciate it!
It’s going to be finish of mine day, except before end I am reading this wonderful piece of writing to improve my experience.
Nice post. I was checking constantly this blog and I’m impressed!
Very useful information particularly the last part 🙂 I care for such
info a lot. I was looking for this certain information for a very long time.
Thank you and good luck.