Will Washington State Stand for Freedom and against the Gay Agenda?

by: tim dunkin | published: 05 05, 2013

The left-wing war on liberty never ends. Every day, it seems, those on the far Left find some new way to impose their will upon everyone else in the nation, all the while proclaiming that they’re doing so for “equality” and “freedom.” Yet, as reasonable people will tell you, when the Left talks about “freedom,” what it means is that you are “free” to accept the required liberal social and moral standards being enforced by the power of the state. Of course, the unspoken converse is that you are not free to refuse to do so. You are not free to think for yourself and make an individual decision about what you will do or not do, think or not think, believe or not believe. For the Left and their spear carriers in the media, “freedom” is synonymous with “acquiescing to government-mandated liberalism.”

So is the case with one flower shop owner in Washington state who is being prosecuted by that state’s Attorney General for refusing to cater to a gay “wedding,” on the basis of her own personal religious and moral convictions. For exercising her actual constitutional rights, she is now being punished by her state government.

In what is a rare exposition of backbone on the part of elected Republican politicians, twelve state lawmakers have filed a bill in that state that would allow business owners to refuse to serve gay “weddings” and other events that they disagree with on the basis of conscience and religious beliefs.

As you might expect, the fanatical Left is going crazy merely even contemplating that this bill might pass. Misrepresentations of both the bill, and what constitutes a “right,” abound as the left-wingers argue – on the basis of “freedom” – that business owners should continue to be forced to support that which they do not agree with. What is in reality a solidly constitutional bill that would affirm and protect the First Amendment freedoms of religion and association is being cast as some sort of attempt to round up gay people and put them in concentration camps, if the media foot soldiers of the Lavender Mafia were to be believed. Even the title of the original article, “A Surprising State Introduced Anti-LGBTQ Legislation,” displays the inherent bias of the media nimrod who wrote the article, as if gays ought to have some sort of special right to force other people to do things for them, all because of their own particular lifestyle choices, and it’s somehow “anti-“anything to prevent this from happening.

In a just world, people would simply have to accept that the First Amendment guarantees every American citizen the rights, among other things, to act on their religious beliefs as they see fit, and to choose to associate with who they will, or not associate with those who they won’t. This remains true, whether you, personally, agree with the choices as to religion and association that someone else makes. In short, it’s not your business, so it’s not your call. In the realm of commerce, this also bears true. If a business owner does not choose to supply flowers to a gay “wedding,” or to photograph it, or whatever else, that is the business owner’s choice. Anything less than this is not freedom, but tyranny.

Would gays like it if they were forced to attended services at fundamentalist Christian churches? Then why do they want to force other people to cater to their proclivities?

Of course, the standard left-wing answer is because “nobody should be allowed to be a bigot!” The childish name-calling and obviously lack of critical thinking skills that goes with it aside, this is an exceedingly insufficient argument.

First, it relies upon the spurious (yet strangely common among liberals) notion that “disagreement” equals “hatred.” If you disagree with the homosexual lifestyle, then you obviously “hate” gays, just as if you were the KKK or something. The concept never seems to occur to them that a person can disagree without hatred, that they can have no personal animus towards the one they disagree with while still opposing what they do or believe. In short, the Left doesn’t seem to understand the concept of actual, intellectually mature toleration, opting instead for an immature, socially inept “all or nothing” view. Either you are totally on-board with gays and their agenda, or else you are a dirty hater who probably wants to lynch them. Frankly, this says more about liberals than it does anything else.

More to the point, however, is that the liberal response begs the question, “Why can’t people be allowed to be ‘bigots’”? Again, what business of yours is the opinions that other people hold, and how they express them, so long as they’re not beating somebody up or something? What makes you think you have the right to force somebody else to hold an opinion against their will, and to act on this false opinion against their will? When you do this, that makes you the fascist, not the person whose opinion you don’t like.

By extension, who somebody chooses to do business or not do business with is their business, not yours. Free association, remember? If you think it’s a shame and a horror that a caterer won’t cater to a gay “wedding” because of the owner’s personal convictions, then feel free to not do business with that caterer yourself. That’s your right. Let the free market handle these matters, instead of getting the government to come in and enforce your personal opinion onto a whole host of other people who disagree. Nobody has a civil right to force other people to do things for them.

But, liberals can’t do it. They can’t find it within themselves to simply let other people believe and act as they will, without interference from left-wing nannies. People on the Left feel an almost genetic compulsion toward forcing everyone else to not only accept what they believe, but to throw in for it as well. This is where the leftist conception of “positive rights” comes from. It’s not enough to provide a liberty-driven free market for, say, health care in which medical providers and insurance companies have to compete for customers, driving up quality and driving down cost, thus enabling more and more people to access the system (by the way, anyone who thinks that the health care industry pre-ObamaCare was “free market” doesn’t know anything about either health care or free markets). Instead, they assert that “health care is a civil right” and go about imposing greater and greater costs on some so as to “provide” for others, while doing so in a system that has been basically ruined from a quality standpoint (look to the British NHS for a good example of this). Housing is a “civil right.” A “living wage” (whatever that means) is a “civil right.” And now, making caterers and photographers service gay “weddings” against their wills is a “civil right.”

It is a truism – wherever you have somebody asserting a positive right TO something that somebody else has to provide at the cost of an imposition on their property and their livelihood, you have an incipient fascist who needs to be watched closely and kept as far away from the levers of power as possible.

I am not hopeful that this bill will actually become law in the state of Washington. While the Republicans (and three crossover Democrats in something called the “Majority Coalition Caucus”) hold a razor-thin majority in the Senate, the Democrats have a substantial majority in the state House of Representatives. Even if it passes the Senate, it will die in the House, and with it hopes in this legislative term for reaffirming protections for constitutional religious and associational rights. Nevertheless, even broaching such a bill, especially in Washington state, in the emotionalistic, anti-intellectual climate of politics in Barack Obama’s America, is a courageous act that will hopefully cause some people to start questioning their knee-jerk assumptions and to once again consider what the Constitution actually says and protects, rather than what small but aggressive pressure groups like the gay lobby would like to force onto everyone else.

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  Curt D.

  And I suppose that the conservative agenda gives gays freedom to marry each other while the left agenda prevent heterosexuals from doing the same?

  The freedom to be a bigot? Since bigotry starts in the hearts and minds of people, there is nothing to prevent bigotry. But if you are offering public services, you have swallow that bigotry less it returns back to you.

  
  

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