June 18, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Jim Obergefell, the man whose name will be forever associated with the institution of genderless marriage in the United States, said he “was heartbroken and devastated,” by the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision.
But more than that, Obergefell is frightened. Very frightened.
It’s not the actuality of the ruling that scares him; it’s the boogeymen he has concocted in order to shoo away any second guessing about the high court’s judgement in his favor three years ago.
“After deciding in favor of marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges,” asked Obergefell in a commentary written for The Advocate, “how could Justices Kennedy, Kagan, and Breyer rule in favor of legalized discrimination under the guise of religious freedom?”
Obergefell’s reaction to the ruling then launches into ever-increasing hyperbole.
He says this signals the beginning of the legalization of discrimination. More specifically, this discrimination will be Christian fundamentalists lording it over gays:
We have a movement to make public discrimination based on one’s personal beliefs legal. These laws attempt to make one person’s beliefs more valuable, more worthy of protection, than another’s.
It gets worse. Obergefell sees Jack Phillips Masterpiece Cakeshop as the underground headquarters for a movement to do away with the principle of separation of church and state, and the establishment of a new state religion:
They aim to make one person’s or one group’s beliefs superior to all others in the public sphere and, in effect, to establish that religion as a national religion that carries more legal weight than others.
The urgency of his hyperbolic statements builds, sentence by sentence. He coins a new term, “the religious refusal movement,” for what he thinks he sees happening:
It is past time for us to call this religious refusal movement and related legislative efforts exactly what they are …
He sees this as a dark, insidious conspiracy, saying it is:
... an attempt to legalize persecution of others in the public sphere.
At the heart of the conspiracy is the court’s turning religion into a cudgel to persecute and beat back the innocent gays:
Proponents of these efforts are weaponizing religion to protect their beliefs at the expense of others in daily life and in our laws.
He then draws a straight line from Jack Phillips declining to decorate a wedding cake for one gay couple’s ‘marriage,’ back to racism; to white supremacy; and finally to the wholesale slaughter of millions:
It wasn’t long ago that a holy book was used to justify laws banning interracial marriages. White supremacists use their holy book to justify their racist attitudes toward people of color. Less than a century ago, religion was used to justify the wholesale slaughter of millions of people.
Perhaps Jim Obergefell has his Supreme Court rulings mixed up. The 7-2 Court decision which is actually responsible for the “wholesale slaughter of millions” was Roe v Wade, decided in 1973. Over 60 million American children––a high percentage of whom were black, suggesting white supremacy––have been murdered since then.
Ironically, Jim’s parting shot––his wistful concluding statement––is something with which I wholeheartedly agree:
In my remarks to the press following the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, I said I look forward to the day that “same-sex marriage” and “gay marriage” no longer exist and it’s simply marriage.
I, too, “look forward to the day that ‘same-sex marriage’ and ‘gay marriage’ no longer exist,” and all that is left is “simply marriage,” but for a wholly different reason.
‘Same-sex marriage’ and ‘gay marriage’ represent an impossible juxtaposition of terms, because marriage––the real thing––is complementary and conjugal, no matter how much some people imagine it could be otherwise.
Jim Obergefell’s boogeymen will neither obscure the fallacies of the high court’s majority opinion in his 2015 case, nor will it erase the truth about the immutable nature of the one true definition of marriage.
Not discrimination. Not persecution. Just sound reasoning.