Back at the dawn of the gay liberation movement in the 1960s, same-sex marriage wasn’t an issue that confronted straight people. Nor would it have occurred to other than a handful of deep thinking straight people, that denial of marriage rights to gays and lesbians was discriminatory. To be fair to we slow-thinking clods, marriage in general was being questioned by younger people during those years. It was the existing financial and legal ramifications and the social and religious conventions of marriage over co-habitation (none of which were going to change anytime soon) that led many of the doubters to wed.
When later the LBGT community raised the issue of domestic partner public employee health benefits and soon thereafter, domestic partner registry, how could denial of this be anything but discriminatory? Before such rights could spread outside San Francisco (Dianne Feinstein vetoed the first SF measure and thus revealed that she’s okay with discrimination) Berkeley, West Hollywood, Santa Cruz and a few other small communities, same-sex weddings began to happen. They were called “Holy Unions.” Not legal marriages but a celebration of a relationship commitment and often with an ordained minister as the officiant.
Slowly, those with a weaker but not absent equality principle and major educational efforts by the LBGT community, began to acknowledge that marriage laws did discriminate against same-sex couples. So, like liberals tend always to do, they split the baby. Domestic partnership law, okay. Marriage, no. As if Plessy v. Ferguson remained the law of the land. That separate could be equal.
Yet, in 1996, Congress passed and Clinton supported and signed legislation that enshrined LGBT inequality. A hundred years earlier would those people would have approved Jim Crow laws? A mere fourteen Senators recognized that POS for what it was and declined to endorse it. Only four of those fourteen remain with us and in federal office today: Senators Boxer, Feinstein, and Wyden and SOS Kerry. Eleven of the eighty-four discrimination endorsers remain in the Senate and one occupies the VP office. Liberals will forgive or overlook this lack of good judgment by certain Democrats because today they claim to have “evolved” in their thinking. They’re either just really slow at applying the principles of equality and non-discrimination to an issue that they hadn’t learned from history, are spineless or poll driven politicians, or have no guiding principles. Whatever the excuse, they can’t be defined as leaders.
(In 2003, the most prevalent reason given by commentators on liberal blogs as to why Howard Dean was unacceptable is that he had signed Vermont’s domestic partnership law.)
An understandable response on the left to the recent RFRA state laws and bakeries and pizza parlors that define their freedom as the ability to discriminate against LBGT customers is to be like them and refuse to do business with homophobes. Understandable but not principled. The owners of Enchanting Creations in Miami Shores, FL demonstrate how to be principled and not like the haters.
In recent weeks Enchanting Creations has received a series of inquiries seeming to have stemmed from recent events in Indiana and Oregon, all of which begging the same basic question: Will you make us an Anti-gay Cake?
Unfortunately, we haven’t been the only targets; the idea of “setting a trap” for small bakeries to catch them in the act of discrimination has become increasingly more common, and we feel it’s time to clarify our stance on this issue.
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We believe that no one should ever be refused service – opposing discrimination by practicing it is not the answer.
They have a better answer.
