My wife posted a link to persecuted florist Baronelle Stutzman’s speech before some legislators, recently, and someone who I seriously hope will one day recover from a lapse into unbelief promptly replied with the opposing party line: “Refusing to offer services to someone based on the sexual orientation is discrimination. Discrimination based on religious belief doesn’t get some sort of special pass.”
A conversation some 68 replies long ensued, one I really can’t be bothered to read past the first few exchanges. I thought, though, that it was worth a little time to reply.
My comments:
I always think it’s ludicrous–self-satirizing, really–that people will use the word “discrimination” as though it is obvious that “to discriminate” is an evil act.
Or that putting some words in legislation is sufficient to move “to discriminate in service X based on factor Y” beyond the realm of the debatable.
Such reasoning makes every whim of the regime a moral commandment subject to no reasonable debate, only to gusts of violence that create new whims, which are equally to be regarded as “the new normal”…”We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”
It is, in short, nothing but a call for violent unreason.
If political acts are proper subjects of reason, then there are realities to which our language and our understanding must be proportioned; we must seek the fitness of our understanding to the realities that we are bound to “bump up against” when we attempt to legislate our wishes blindly.
If there are realities to which our legal language must be proportioned, then it is always right to argue for the reform of legal language in the direction of just law–that is, of legal language which is correctly proportioned to the realities that any human society must either conform to or damage its members.
Now, if one believes that mandatory recognition of fake marriages as “marriage” is the correct way to proportion legal language to reality, then one is free to advocate that–as long as the First Amendment privilege of promoting Pastafarianism and Catholicism and Scientology and silly Coexist stickers holds.
Of course, that privilege is exactly what is being destroyed whenever the blind legislation of wishes and the advocacy of violent unreason predominate over the advocacy of substantive conformity of the laws to reality.
And a mass-market democracy being explicitly prone to promote violent unreason (and its perfectly predictable corollary, lawless regime violence in protection of its partisans), we can expect more of this to happen. We will have to resist by providing increasingly forceful arguments for the substantive conformity of legal language to what can actually be lawful, and doing so with increasing firmness and fervor.
And we surely should not join the chorus of superstitious fools and intellectual cargo-cultists who wave words like “discriminate” about like the talismans of their Know-Nothing deity.
(source: [shared with my wife’s friends only])