Original texts mandate discrimination
If you’ve glanced at news concerning the recently vetoed Arizona anti-gay bill, you’ve probably read a description of the legislation like the following from The New York Times: “a controversial bill that would have let business owners use religion as a pretext to refuse service to gay men, lesbians and other people.”
Sounds pretty good, right? The writer neatly cuts off religion from the practice of discrimination and implies that there isn’t even the faintest connection between the two.
It’s a sentence worthy of the Times, both in its craftiness and its sterility. “Pretext” implies that religion is being used as a mere tool for discrimination, rather than the source of it.
Religion, the article seems to say, is the tool through which hate flows, not the cause of hate itself.
This can’t quite be allowed.
I know people have said this time and time again, but is it not true that the Lord called homosexuality as “an abomination” in the Judeo-Christian tradition? A few more verses into Leviticus, and one finds a charming little passage condemning gay people to death, contentedly adding, “Their blood shall be upon them.” (Nothing like a touch of homophobic blood ritual for that sense of uplift one usually gets from reading the Old Testament, no?)
Whatever your overall interpretation of those books may be, it’s impossible to say that discrimination isn’t right there in the text.
Additionally, if other Bible verses seem to contradict this straight-forward injunction, why are those verses superior to the ones they contradict? In other words, why does “Love thy neighbor as thyself” trump “stone those who sleep with the same sex?” Both are examples of revealed wisdom. Both are also clearly incompatible.
In my opinion, the only difference between the two is that modern sensibilities tend to gravitate towards the former over the latter. Most people choose to believe the biblical injunctions society already agrees with, while disowning those verses incompatible with modern life. (Religion a la carte, so to speak.)
With this in mind, a store owner who wants to keep gay people out of his establishing isn’t necessarily “using religion as a pretext.” They are practicing their discriminatory (that is, literal) interpretation of faith.
Obviously, most people of faith aren’t bigots. But those who decide to take their religious texts literally aren’t misusing faith. On the contrary, they’re the ones who accept all of the tenants of faith without question.
The scant few Republicans who defended the now-defeated bill in its death throes made a similar mistake. In a wonderful, textbook false dichotomy, they indignantly said that the bill wasn’t about discrimination, but the freedom to practice one’s religion.
They managed to be neither exactly right, nor completely wrong. The bill wasn’t about either concept individually; it’s about both. It’s about the freedom to practice a form of religion that discriminates against gay people.
Now, the question we have to ask ourselves: Is this the kind of freedom worth protecting?