Tolerance Turned on Its Head

Tolerance Turned on Its Head

American Spectator - Friday April 15, 2016

Sexual lefties don’t have policy merits on their side. But they’re clearly winning the communications battle, using their usual tactics of distorting and demonizing reasonable, traditional positions on public policy, and simply assuming the moral high ground.

Evidence for this is the considerable public opposition to religious freedom laws, such as those that have lately created kerfuffles in North Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. These laws do not, as the left cynically asserts, inconvenience gays or other of the left’s constituencies. But their absence does allow the left to do great damage to the First Amendment, and to traditional Christian believers with deep and sincere religious objections to parts of the left’s brave new sexual agenda.

Just 29 percent of those recently contacted by Rasmussen Reports say they favor a religious freedom law where they live, while 64 percent say they are opposed to such laws. Similar polls across the country have yielded similar results.

The only coherent explanation for these results in a religious country with a history of respecting believers is that many well-intentioned, perhaps even pious, Americanos believe protecting religious freedom would damage gays and those whom we have been hectored into referring to as “transgender.” They would not. The number of Americans who would take advantage of these laws is very small. With these laws in effect, gays would have no trouble at all finding bakers to provide cakes for them, or photographers to capture their festivities on film.

All that is at issue here is the small number of people with sincere religious objections to being part of such ceremonies. These folks could easily be accommodated without any loss to gays, et al. There are plenty of bakers, photographers, and other small business entrepreneurs more interested in cash flow than in a fundamentalist view of proper sexual behavior.

But the sexual left doesn’t want to accommodate those whom they viscerally dislike. Sexual politics is flowing their way just now, and they wish to rub traditionalists’ noses in it. The animus against religious freedom laws in The Movement is not motivated by a desire for fairness and respect, but by plain meanness.

Gays, long targets of intolerance and discrimination, have been, over the last couple of decades, welcomed into mainstream society. And about time too. But excluding and visiting intolerance on others is no way for gays to celebrate their own emancipation. Anti-gay prejudice has been a legitimate subject of concern for a long time. It’s past time that the prejudices of the gay political movement had its own time in the spotlight. 

Happily, this highly contentious issue is not without its comic moments, and there are even benefits associated with taking the outré positon on this. After the North Carolina state legislature mandated that men should use the men’s room rather than the ladies’, Bruce Springsteen canceled a concert scheduled for Greensboro. 

 “Some things are more important than a rock show, and this fight against prejudice and bigotry, which is happening as I write, is one of them,” the implausibly popular rocker said in a written statement. Well, he’s certainly right about things being more important than rock concerts — from where I sit this includes everything — but the North Carolina law has everything to do with common sense and nothing to do with prejudice or bigotry.

Then the execrable Michael Moore saidhe would ask his film distributor not to burden North Carolina with his latest celluloid incoherence. “I have asked my distributor not to book my film in any theater in North Carolina due 2 their bigoted law against LGBTQ ppl — they have agreed,” the C-list left picador tweeted.

Who knew it would be so easy? Had the good burgers of North Carolina known they could avoid noise against the inoffensive night at a Greensboro concert site, and be free of some of the worst movies in the history of the world statewide, they would have made traditional bathroom etiquette a matter of law long ago.

 The Daily Caller, ironically I’m sure, headlined the story about Moore withdrawing his creations from North Carolina with, “Michael Moore Punishes North Carolina For Keeping Men Out Of Women’s Restrooms.” Punishment? Had I been the Caller’s editor, I would have inserted a representation of the great Foghorn Leghorn below the headline declaring, “I say, that’s a joke son.”

Read More Here