Bryan, it’s been — well, it’s been a day or two since you last rose to the level of needing a gentle smackdown for your doltitude. What do you have for us today?
Protecting your church from the Gay Gestapo?
Oh, that should be good. What do you have to say, Bryan?
Homosexual activists, called the “Gay Gestapo” by lesbian Tammy Bruce, are busily suing or harassing every Christian business owner and wedding vendor they can find. So far they have gone after wedding photographers, bakers, florists, wedding chapel operators, counselors and now even wedding planners.
The legal principles involved here are pretty simple and straightforward — and have nothing to do with Christianity.
If a given state, county, or city has enacted a statute indicating that discrimination based on sexual orientation is not allowed, it’s not allowed. That’s not anti-Christian, that’s anti-discriminatory, and covers both those people (not all of them Christian, and not all Christians) who, for whatever reason, would prefer not to deal with gay people. These laws generally cover one or both of two areas: employment, and “public accommodations.”
Employment is pretty straightforward — you can’t fire, not-hire, or treat in a discriminatory fashion someone based on their sexual orientation. The same is true for other protected classes: race, gender, national origin, age, even (gasp) religion. Exceptions are generally made for religious institutions: women can’t file employment discrimination suits because the Catholic Church doesn’t hire female priests.
But these exceptions are made for institutions that are explicitly religious in their make-up and purpose, such as churches themselves. They aren’t made for individuals who claim a religious belief in discrimination of some sort. The reason for that is pretty obvious, Bryan — anyone can claim anything as a religious belief, and the courts have generally been reluctant to decide who is being sincere and who is not.
So folk can’t say, “Well, my religion tells me that the races should be kept separate, so I only hire whites here.” Or, “My faith informs me that women should be at home, not in the workplaces, so I fired all the women-folk here.” Or, “The span of a man’s life is three-score years and ten, so I fire anyone who is over 70.” Or, “My faith thinks that Christians are evil oppressors of the True Belief, and so I don’t let any on my workforce.” That’s all not allowed, even if someone claims it violates their religious beliefs.
So is that oppressing people of faith, Bryan?
“Public accommodation” is a bit fuzzier to define, but essentially it means being open to the public to provide good and services. You can’t refuse a place at the lunch counter for blacks. You can’t open up a public restaurant just for men. You can’t have a golf course that Jews aren’t allowed to play at. If you open the doors to the public, you open them to all the public, especially protected classes (as noted above) that have been subject to discrimination in the past. It doesn’t make any difference if your disdain for serving blacks, women, Jews, stems from mere bigotry or from religious conviction.
But I’m sure we’ll see some examples below of the vast power of the state twisting the arm of hapless Christian businessfolk to force them to serve Those Kind against their Christ-inspired will:
Lana Rusev, who runs Simply Elegant Wedding Planning in Jacksonville, Florida, turned down a lesbian ceremony because of her deeply held conviction that marriage is exclusively a one-man, one-woman institution.
I can see her dilemma. There are people she thinks should not get married, but they want to, and come to her to plan the wedding because she’s a publicly operated business. That’s a tough situation to be in.
Rusev’s family fled Ukraine 26 years ago just to find freedom from this kind of anti-Christian hatred and oppression. Welcome to the land of the free, eh?
Really? They were also wedding planners who were being forced to plan weddings for lesbians? That is one hell of a coincidence, Bryan.
But, seriously, tell me about the “anti-Christian hatred and oppression” here.
For taking a stand on biblical principle, she has been blistered, demonized and vilified on her company’s Facebook page, and her business has been added to the LBGT no-go-zone directory.
Wait … what? There’s no legal repercussions here, no fines, nothing, just people expressing how unhappy they are with Ms Rusev’s point of view? Really? Your example is even more of a crock than I thought, Bryan.
I mean, here’s essentially what’s happened: A customer goes into a store. The store owner says, “I don’t like your face, so get out.” The customer posts about their experience on the Internet. People say mean things about the store owner, and the store’s rating on Yelp drops to one star.
Guess what, Bryan, that happens every day. Hell, look at some of the things you’ve said about Muslims, about gays, about people whose Christian beliefs are at variance with yours. Are all those people somehow suffering some actual damage because of it? When people call you a dolt, Bryan, is that some sort of hate crime or oppressive act?
I’ve looked up some more detailed descriptions of what happened here. Ms Rusev declined the job because she was already busy that weekend, and then gratuitously added, “Due to my strong personal belief I do not feel comfortable planning a wedding for lesbian couples. I hope you understand and not take this personally.”
Sure, of course, if someone told me they thought my marriage was morally wrong, I certainly wouldn’t take it personally. No, wait, of course I would. Why is that any less offensive than people calling Ms Rusev a religious bigot?
Mean-spirited and bigoted …
Categories you have some expertise in, Bryan.
… members of what Bill Maher calls the “gay mafia” …
Probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said about Bill Maher. In fact, you had some pretty not-nice things to say about him (and vice-versa) just last year. Funny person to reference in your support.
And, can you be a bit more clear, Bryan — are the gays a “Gestapo” or a “Mafia”? I want to keep my terms straight.
… won’t rest until every Christian who supports natural marriage is under virtual house arrest, exiled from polite society and forbidden to engage in commerce of any kind.
If you routinely used racial epithets, you wouldn’t be surprised if people stopped inviting you to parties, Bryan.
If someone in a devoutly Christian town started going on and on about how Jesus is a fake and God is a mass murderer, he’d probably be “exiled from polite society.”
When you express your opinions in public, you can’t be arrested by the police (at least not according to the First Amendment), but the people around you can certainly turn their backs on you.
And if you operate a business, and you make it a point to tell people you would rather not have them as customers, it’s likely going to mean fewer customers. That’s why you don’t see a lot of political signs at most retail outlets and shops.
Your church may be next. …
And suddenly you veer into bizarro hypotheticals, Bryan. We’ve been talking about a wedding planner, and now you’re extending it churches?
… Do not think for one minute that the First Amendment all by itself will guarantee your church’s protection from rabid gay activists and their minions in the court system.
Except that there’s no basis to think that any church will be compelled to do anything, because of that actual First Amendment. Hell, we’ve had formal anti-discrimination laws regarding race for years, yet you can still find churches that won’t marry a mixed race couple. There aren’t a lot of them any more, but that’s not because of government oppression or “the black gestapomafia” but because most people think that’s a hateful and lunatic position to take.
The courts have already shredded the First Amendment virtually beyond recognition, …
In what way, Bryan? Hell, they’ve told us that corporations can claim First
… and as far as protecting your church’s religious liberty, it may be hardly worth the parchment it’s printed on.
Give me some examples of churches being legally compelled to hold a religious ceremony that they disagree with. Please, do.
A church in Lakewood, Colorado, is under fire from the gay lobby for canceling a funeral for a lesbian when her family insisted on including in the service pictures of her kissing her lesbian lover. The family is considering a lawsuit against the church, and given the predilection of the courts and its “Gay Rights Uber Alles” mindset, we can expect such a lawsuit to find a sympathetic ear.
Having seen a lot of local coverage of that particular contretemps (1, 2, 3), the issue was not so much that the church would not hold the funeral, but that it canceled the funeral 15 minutes into the ceremony, with an open casket and the place full of 170 mourners, when the pastor of the church (who wasn’t even officiating) said that the memorial video (which had been dropped off days earlier) could not be shown because it included images of the deceased and her wife. It wasn’t a matter, even, of the deceased being a lesbian, as much as showing pictures that indicated it
It’s not surprising the family is considering suing — not because the church doesn’t want to be seen to be supporting the “gay lifestyle,” but because of how it handled the whole matter. Telling the family that pictures of the deceased’s spouse (who’s sitting right there) can’t be shown, in the middle of the funeral, and so the whole shindig is off is both ghastly and emotionally distressing in the extreme.
(I’d argue it’s even un-Christian, in a “Sabbath was made for the Man, not Man for the Sabbath” sort of way. The loving thing to do in the situation was for the pastor to consider and care for the feelings of the grieving people already present, rather than stand on a “Don’t show, don’t tell” theological point at the last moment. But that’s another matter.)
What can your church do to make its stance abundantly clear and head off possible lawsuits at the same time? The elders of my church have formally recommended to our church family an amendment to the Constitution and bylaws that spell out in no uncertain terms the church’s stance on homosexuality and gay marriage. (The elders have wisely provided church members with a 30-day comment period before the statement becomes official.)
In part, the intention here is to anticipate the possibility that the church will be approached to host a gay wedding and its pastor asked to perform a same-sex ceremony.
If you make your church sanctuary available to anyone who comes in and cuts a check, having an internal policy on homosexuality and gay marriage may not be enough, depending on the laws of the city and state you’re in; that makes it pretty close to being nothing more than a public meeting hall, which falls under public accommodation laws. I know that our church does have some rules and preconditions, but it’s not treated as a rental property.
I’d also recommend making sure whatever documentation you have for when people approach you about whether they can get married there make clear any conditions you have (hopefully in a pastoral fashion), so that a last-second change of plans, like what happened in Lakewood, doesn’t occur. That’s where people are going to get really cheesed.
I’m going to skip over the proposed change in your church’s “Statement of Faith,” Bryan, except to note the irony of noting that “every person must be afforded compassion, love, kindness, respect, and dignity” and that “hateful and harassing behavior or attitudes directed toward any individual are to be repudiated and are not in accord with Scripture nor the doctrines of the church.” You might want to check out some of your broadcasts and columns, Bryan.
To be forewarned is to be forearmed. It might be wise for every church in America to formally adopt this statement or one like it to prepare with prudence and foresight for a litigiously uncertain future.
It’s pretty darned clear that the only way that a church is going to get in trouble is if they treat their building as a public accommodation, open to all sorts of use … except when requested by a protected class. If the church’s sanctuary is treated as a holy place, you’re pretty safe on First Amendment grounds, unless you’ve mysteriously seen some case law that I haven’t, Bryan.
That said, there are an increasing number of Christian churches that actually welcome gay congregants, celebrate or bless same-sex weddings, and allow funeral services for gay people without asking their lives be visually bowdlerized.
Thomas Jefferson’s famous wall of separation, as he articulated it, was designed to protect the church from the intrusion and interference of the state (not, you will note, to protect the state from the influence of the church).
Nicely played, Bryan, but nonsensical. Walls have to work both ways. If a church can “intrude and interfere” in the state, then the state will inevitably reciprocate on other churches. The Danbury Baptists (in the letter that provoked Jefferson’s famous response), noted “what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights.” The state was interfering with their church, but only because a majority denomination (Congregationalists) dominated in the state.
Jefferson’s wall, erected by the Constitution itself, was intended to prevent the very thing we are witnessing: the state breaking down that protective barrier and barging into the affairs of Christians, Christian business owners and churches and telling them what they must believe and do.
There is nothing the state is doing to tell Christian churches what they must believe. And, it’s worth reiterating, your major example given, Lana Rusev and New Hope Ministries in Lakewood are not under any sort of state / legal sanction regarding their beliefs. They are facing social opprobrium for what they’ve done, and, in the latter case, possible civil action for (my guess is) breach of contract and infliction of emotional distress.
It’s time to rebuild Jefferson’s wall, and this statement just might be the place to start.
Bryan, I assure you — when I see the government dictating to churches what they must do in their religion, or to people what they must believe, I’ll be right there on the picket lines with you. But I’m not going to support public businesses that discriminate — in employment or in serving the public — against folk on the basis of age, race, national origin, religion, or sexual orientation. If you can’t see the difference there, Bryan, I suggest you look again.