I have finally figured it out!
I was in the middle of writing a post about the mess in Indiana this week, and about the little Pizza restaurant that has basically been shut down because the owners said they would hypothetically refuse to cater a hypothetical gay wedding with their pizza. (Seriously, like that request is ever gonna happen.) As I was explaining the stupidity of the comparison to making Muslims serve pork or making a Jew draw a swastika on a cake (I’ll summarize below after I get to my epiphany) it hit me:
Christians have obviously decided their churches are full enough. FINALLY! They’re not going to be going door-to-door any more. They’re collectively going to stop telling the rest of us about the Good News of Jesus Christ and trying to get us to repeat after them and say that stupid prayer so we can get to heaven.
They’ve obviously decided Heaven is short on Real Estate. That Hell has a personnel shortage. That enough people have hopped on the Gospel Train and they can relax and let the rest of us trot merrily off to Hell to burn for all eternity. They no longer care.
How do I know this? Well, it’s clear from their actions.
You see, if they cared about the souls of the people they are spending so much energy judging and condemning they’d think twice before turning them away. If they REALLY BELIEVED that Stan and Mike are going to Hell for all eternity, wouldn’t they take every opportunity – like say, catering their wedding?? – to spend time with Stan and Mike, so they might have a chance to show the “love of Christ” to Stan and Mike?
Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? Didn’t their guy JC tell them “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” (John 13:35).
During my time as a fundamentalist Christian, I read the Bible many times over. (You see we had this thing called a “B.R.E.A.D. chart” – it stood for “Bible Reading Enriches Any Day” and it was a plan that broke the bible up so you read a chapter or so every day and you made it through the whole giant book over the course of a year. I was in this church for 20 years, but can’t say I used my chart consistently all that time. Still, I’ve read it. All of it. Even all the “begat” verses.) As hard as I scan my memory banks I cannot find a verse that says anything about “they shall feel your condemnation and come to know me.”
So clearly, sometime since my departure a memo has circulated where everyone agreed to just drop the facade. “Lets just stop pretending,” it must have said, “that we give half a donkey’s backside whether or not those sodomites ever escape judgement. Let’s just wash our hands of them and that way we can avoid their filth and perversion!”
And suddenly, POOF! Laws spring up protecting Christians rights to be the snobby elitists they are at heart. To give them some backup when the filth actually thinks it deserves the same respect the Holy Chosen Ones are afforded. Now they can keep the rest of us rabble at arms length and never deal with us again. Which means they won’t be pestering us about joining up with them anymore. (At least, I’m hoping it applies to all of us “sinners” and not JUST to the LGBT folks)
I’m so happy! What a wonderful silver lining to this distasteful story!
Now, about those analogies I mentioned above:
Lets make it simple. Muslims refusing to serve pork is not discrimination because they refuse to serve it to EVERYONE. It’s called product selection. A Jew cannot be forced to write “Hitler was right” on a cake because he has the right of free speech, and because he would refuse to write that line for EVERYONE. Everyone has the right to refuse those types of things because you’d blanketly refuse to do them for everyone.
The difference comes when you say that yes, you will make wedding cakes, but JUST not for certain types of people. Are we all clear?
Now that that’s settled, I’m going to go get ready for my full moon meditation. Blessed Be.