Posted on 04/03/2015 1:40:39 PM PDT by Kaslin
One may reasonably wonder whether the militant left in this country is solely dedicated to manufacturing issues to keep the nation in a constant state of uproar, angst and disharmony. We're seeing lots of negativity and intolerance from those so concerned that we all love one another.
Their most recent cause for hysterical urgency is Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The left has gone absolutely bonkers attempting to paint that legislation as a license for Christians to discriminate against gays for sport and is smearing anyone who supports it as a reactionary bigot.
Don't you long for those days when words had meaning? Now we have propagandists whose principal job is to deceitfully distort word meanings to promote their causes.
A few examples in the context of the issue at hand are "hate," "homophobe," "discrimination" and "anti-." People who oppose same-sex marriage do not fear or hate people who are gay. They are not advocating discrimination against them, and they are not against them.
These calculated distortions have had an enormous impact on our culture, infecting even people who should know better. Now enshrined in our popular culture, these misrepresentations affect the way people think (which is the whole point, of course) and lead to imputed motives with no basis in fact.
Consider U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's unfortunate language in his opinion in the Windsor case, in which the court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional.
Kennedy said the government's refusal to recognize same-sex marriages imposed a "stigma," codified a "separate status" into law and "humiliate(d)" a certain group of people. He said, "The principal purpose and the necessary effect of this law are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage."
Those were grossly unwarranted accusations. In fact, Kennedy's reckless language could cause the exact harm he professed to be condemning, for he flagrantly stigmatized, humiliated and demeaned proponents of DOMA in presumptuously imputing motives to them they don't possess.
Somewhat similarly, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, in walking back his position on Indiana's law, said, "No one should be harassed or mistreated because of who they are, who they love or what they believe."
That was a profoundly regrettable choice of words that only lends credence to the dishonest activists who are attempting to vilify people who support a law that protects one of this nation's most basic and sacred freedoms, the freedom of religion. Under no reasonable construction of language can business owners' refusal to perform services or sell products for events that celebrate causes that violate their religious beliefs be considered harassment. The only people being harassed on this issue are the business owners, because of their religious beliefs.
The Indiana law doesn't authorize businesses to deny services to gay people at will. Neither the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act nor any of the state RFRAs have been used as a license for merchants to refuse to do business with gays. But there is a qualitative difference between refusing to serve gays in general and declining to provide services for the very event that solemnizes their legal marriage.
We should expect better from Kennedy and Pence, but not White House press secretary Josh Earnest, who said the Indiana law "could reasonably be used to try to justify discriminating against somebody because of who they love." That incendiary language completely distorts the motive of those who don't want to service same-sex marriage ceremonies, and he knows it.
Leftists also want to marginalize Christians who support such legislation as hateful kooks and outliers, but the truth is that Christianity sanctifies marriage as between one man and one woman, and that is not only in the Old Testament. Those who claim that Jesus never condemned homosexuality should know that he did affirm marriage as between a man and a woman. Reciting Genesis, he said, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?" (Matthew 19:4-5).
Let's not forget what the federal and state RFRAs, as construed by the courts, do. They seek to balance sometimes-conflicting interests. They say the government can't force people to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs unless it can prove it has a compelling interest in doing so, and only then if it does so by the least restrictive means.
Again, RFRAs recognize potential disagreements and provide for a reasonable balancing of those interests. But the ugly truth is that opponents of RFRAs don't want there to be a balancing test. They don't believe that the religious convictions of Christians on same-sex marriage deserve any protection. They are the extremists in this conflict, not the Christian merchants who choose to respectfully decline performing services for a very minute fraction of transactions involving gays.
What people should keep in mind is that any real hatred involved in this latest hot-button issue is emanating from the people who are falsely claiming to be victimized by hate. The nasty, mean-spirited rhetoric, the desire to harm people for exercising their religion and the efforts to smear a certain group of people are coming from leftist activists against Christians, not Christians against gays. Those are the facts.
The question is, Will our Republican politicians have the backbone to stand up for what is right on this issue and vindicate religious liberty?
That argument that Jesus never mentions homosexuality is stupid. He never said that you shouldn’t have sex with cats, either. But some of us are already smart enough to know that and don’t need to be told.
ABAOLUTELY! Disharmony begs for settlement and settlement is an opportunity to usurp power. Political power is the life blood of socialism; it feeds on conflict. The more dysfunction there is, the more conflict to settle, enforce, and remediate, then requiring armies of bureaucrats on fat retirements. Then to tax the healthy to the point that they can't raise more kids. Then to teach the kids more dysfunctional ideas.
Etc.
Alas, very few.
“...Will our Republican politicians have the backbone....”
BWWHAAHAAHAAHHAAHHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
No.
Jesus, who told Moses to write down Lev. 18 and 20, had already spoken on homosexuality.
As intended. The difficulty is that exactly what sort of impact is impossible to predict, and the rationalization that any upsetting of the status quo is by definition good, pales in the sight of evidence to the contrary: in Egypt, in Libya, in Iraq, in a hundred places where "change is good" is a bitter joke. In short, the proggies had their chance and they blew it, and doubling down only doubles the damage.
The stereotypical Bible-banging, gun-holding, bitter clingers were always a sort of highly synthetic enemy, useful as a focus for hatred but strangely evasive when the demagogues tried to pin them down to cases. Stereotypes are like that. But there are real people out here who are thoroughly sick of being the butt of a sick, slanted, and outdated narrative. The Left will never see us coming because its adherents see only what they want to. That's going to be a problem, because you can't close your eyes against a tidal wave.
Most people know instinctively who the real haters are.
People who use government to literally force you not to live your moral beliefs.
People who if the other side tries to change a law you like you scream it’s the end of the world and burn down your own town.
People who are racists yet claim to be victims of racism and are treated with special status under the law.
People who do the very same things they project and blame those they hate as doing, while they themselves are doing it.
People who love to use government against those doing good. People who want government to protect those doing bad.
That was already taken care of with the mention of bestiality in Leviticus, and Jesus did not nullify said morals.
They are nothing but bullies, but they have the full force of this Gov’t Admin behind them.
as long as the cat is declawed, .....nevermind.
I’d like to see OUR version of that sign: the mathematical “unequal”. Counterfeit marriages and homo buggery are NOT the equal of heterosexual relationships, and no amount of pretending will make them so.
You can wish 2 + 2 to “equal” five, but you’re going to be disappointed when you count your change.
Actually He did, but it’s in Revelation so people who dismiss that book say that. But this is what He did say:
I am the ‘A’ and the ‘Z,’ the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. How blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they have the right to eat from the Tree of Life and go through the gates into the city! Outside are the homosexuals, those involved with the occult and with drugs, the sexually immoral, murderers, idol-worshippers, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
Rev. 22:13-15
http://www.biblestudytools.com/cjb/revelation/22.html
Homelysexuals are the real haters. They hate themselves first. Then they project that hatred on everyone else. So sad and hopeless.
The country was founded on religious freedom.
That’s the one book they SHOULDN’T dismiss. Thanks for pointing out the verse. I even already had it marked in my bible, but had forgotten it.
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