Figuring out who the real zealots are in a religious war

Gay marriage wedding cake photo by Giovanni Dall'Orto, 26-1-2008.A couple of weeks ago, news came out of England that “Muslim staff at a Bradford Council-run care home stopped patients eating pork pies and bacon sandwiches because of their religious beliefs, a report found.”  Most of the people denied their pork pies and bacon sandwiches had no recourse: “Wagtail Close has a respite care facility and is home to people living with physical disabilities, sensory loss, brain injury or learning disabilities.”  This is not a population with a great deal of market mobility.

I linked to the story on my real-me Facebook page, and one of my gay friends had a predictable response: “This sounds just like public servants who refuse to issue wedding licenses, bakers who won’t bake wedding cakes, photographers who won’t do gay marriages, and venues that won’t rent to gay weddings. And they all do in the name of religion and religious freedom.”

Can you spot what’s wrong with my friend’s argument? I spotted it immediately and have been meaning to write about it for days, although life kept intervening. In the first situation, religious fanatics impose their belief on a helpless population that lacks any ability to avoid the fanaticism. In the second situation, religious fanatics also impose their belief on a helpless population that lacks any ability to avoid the fanaticism.

But . . . you have to have a very careful scorecard to understand that, in the second situation, the religious fanatics aren’t the ones the Leftists would have us believe are trying to impose their doctrine on others.

Thus, in the second situation the religious fanatics are not the public servants, the bakers, the photographers, or the venue owners. Instead, the fanatics are those who espouse gay marriage and are determined to destroy anyone who refuses to support their agenda — just as the Muslim employees in the care facility refuse to allow anyone to opt out of their agenda.

As you may recall, in each case where a Christian employee or business owner refused to provide services for a gay marriage, it turned out that there were nearby businesses or government offices that would happily have provided those same services. But in each case, the gay couple deliberately sought out businesses and public servants they knew had a religious objection to gay marriage and, when those people asserted their First Amendment right not to be coerced into engaging in religious activities antithetical to their faith, the gay couples intentionally tried to destroy these Christians. The LGBT cohorts’ goal is to force Christians to lose their jobs, to close their businesses, to bankrupt themselves, to pay heinous fines, or even to face imprisonment — all in an open marketplace where gay couples can easily exercise their newly-created “constitutional” right to gay marriage.

Back in 2008, I warned how this was going to go and how this was going to end. Gay marriage is not about marriage. It is an attack on traditional religion. Just as the fanatical Muslims in the world believe it is their duty to enforce their religious beliefs and practices on everyone in their path, through force if necessary, so too do fanatical proponents of gay marriage believe it is their “religious” duty to enforce their beliefs and practices on everyone — and to steer their path so as to mow down anyone in American society who refuses to get with their program.