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How often have we witnessed TV networks preface religious and other programs with disclaimers that while they enable the airing of the ensuing show, they in no way endorse its content? It is not as if reputational concern for guilt by association is alien to the non-religious. How many of those on the Left were condemned as communists by Joseph McCarthy, simply for flirting with and having attended a socialist/communist meeting decades prior.
In the recent kick-off of Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign at Liberty University, how many liberal media organizations, pundits and commentators decried the forced attendance by Liberty’s students, (on pain of civic-style fines), which gave pubic impression of tacit support and endorsement of Cruz’s candidacy? And their critiques would be right. Many conservative entities likewise declaimed the hypocrisy of speaking for liberty of conscience while in the very process violating it.
Therefore, the desire of theists and like-minded moralists, who do not wish to endorse or appear to endorse an idea or ethical principle, ought not to be beyond comprehension. One may not concur with the substance of their objection. But the yearning not to be associated is not alien. Therefore, the social denigration and legal penalties, inflicted upon those who find same-sex marriage a conceptual travesty and same-sex eros an ethical travesty, emits of a suffocating stench of rational inconsistency, sophistry and hypocrisy.
And the drumbeats of civic conflagration approach ever closer and louder.
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Some reporter from ABC 57 (Alyssa Marino) trolls the Indiana backwoods to find some less than politically savvy business owners about their stance on catering a gay wedding, in order to instigate a social-media mob frenzy. They settled on a hapless Pizza Shop couple as their prey. Although these simple folk would never deny serving a gay person as a person; they could and would not, in good conscience, give approval nor be seen to give approval to that which is against their religious beliefs.
Jess Dooley, a paraprofessional at Concord High School (Elkhart) tweets “Who’s going to Walkerton, IN to burn down #memoriespizza w me?” The pizzeria’s website is hacked with gay porn. Negative slanderous reviews were submitted on YELP by people, many who have never been a 100 miles of Walkerton, IN. The social media and phone threats so rattle the owners that they close down their source of livelihood and are effectively under house arrest.
And America is beginning to see the real face of their LGBT community, which was spoken darkly about during the Proposition 8 debate in California, but not directly evidenced; although something very evident if one has stomach to peruse the various gay ezine message boards.
Even from the perspective of rational self-interest, this gangbang of intimidations and threats upon this simple couple was profoundly obtuse and counterproductive. And for what? Largely over a theoretical. I was told about a wedding reception that took place at Boston Pizza in Orangeville, with each wedding guest having to pay their own way. But it is a story, related with derisive mirth. It is unimaginable that the ‘fabulous’ would be caught dead having a wedding catered by Joe Blow’s pizzeria, except as an act of provocation and humiliation. What next? Christian owners of pet food stores?
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SCENARIO. Another shit-disturbing gay male deliberately seeks to compel a theist, preferably Christian with Biblically orthodox ethics, into photographing a name-that-city’s Gay Pride parade, applying the same arguments used with regard to Gay Weddings, which have been upheld by black-robed lizards, posing as jurists.
The Christian photographer objects on the grounds of nudity and actual sex acts, which occur during such events. But like in the case of Memories Pizza, mainstream press conveniently ignores the particulars of his objection and repeats from the same clichéd template that his refusal is entirely based on hidden and wholesale anti-gay bigotries. Such yellow journalistic deceit is the hallmark of worthless modern media organizations. And the Twitter idiots, whose capacity for rational and insightful thought is as deep as the character limits of their Twitter messages, come out in full virtual menace.
The adversaries exclaim; would not these same Christian photographers attend a Santa Claus’ parade or even an ethnic (i.e. Sikh) festival without issue? And are not Gay Pride Parades civically sanctioned events? Is not every person ethically, if not legally bound by the Rousseaunian General Will; where latitude of conscience is subject to the ‘by your leave’ discretion of those who presently hold the Commanding Heights of society? Or to the zeitgeist?
On and on, it shall continue; with greater travesties against liberty of conscience demanded against conservative and moralist factions by the dogmatists of the secularist Left. Perhaps next, the theist will be coercively commissioned, upon threat of his/her livelihood, to photograph a birthday party inside a gay bathhouse.
And the drumbeats of civic conflagration approach ever closer and louder.
© Copyright John Hutchinson 2015
An Iconoclastic Orthodoxy 