Gay people are less immoral than we thought!

Usually Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association is comparing gay people to pedophiles, Nazis, or whatever other Great and Terrible Evil he wants to tar them with the same brush as.  So being downgraded to merely being as bad (or discrimination-worthy) as shoplifters is actually kind of tame for him.

Fischer's point seems to be that "discrimination" is okay.  That we "discriminate" all the time. And, on one level, he's correct: we speak of a "discriminating palate," and if by discriminating you mean "taking into account the distinct and meaningful differences in things when judging them," the word (and process) is, in and of itself, a useful one.

But that doesn't mean that all discrimination is therefore good and useful.  Fischer often moans and groans about how Christians are discriminated against. But he has no problem with (as in this case) a woman being discriminated against by her Catholic school employer once it was revealed (in her mother's obituary, of all things) that she's gay.  According to Fischer, it's perfectly fine for someone who is "sexually immoral" to be discriminated against in employment, the same as if they were a shoplifter.

The issue, of course, is why you are discriminating, and if the discrimination is meaningful in the context it is made.  We are not allowed, legally, to discriminate in a variety of ways because society has decided, as a whole, that the distinction of those ways is not useful  or meaningful, and is, in fact, destructive. Thus, I can't discriminate against someone in hiring or promotion based on someone's race, religion, ethnicity, gender, national origin, or (in some jurisdictions by law, and company-wise by policy) sexual orientation. Because my personal views on that person's race, or religion, or orientation are not meaningful to whether that person can adequately do the job for which they are employed.

Indeed, if Bryan Fischer applied for a job for me, I could not (and would not) discriminate against him for what I feel are his hateful views and his twisted, even perverted, form of Christianity. Because none of that directly affects whether he can code, or provide tech support, or whatever the job requirements might be, by law and by fact.  Unless, of course, he revealed in the interview that he would feel free to discriminate on which help desk tickets he chose to take based on his opinion of the sexual morality of the people submitting those tickets.  _Then_ I could exercise my own discriminating taste and show him the door.