Preemptive strikes

Many Christians I’ve talked to are worried about what happens after homosexuality is decriminalized and gay marriage is sanctioned. This is a very real motivation for them to strike preemptively and keep homosexuality criminalized.

A lot of church leaders focus on narratives where a cake shop owner or pastor or Mozilla’s CEO are sued or fired for being anti-gay. From their point of view, people should be allowed to choose whether or not to serve a customer based on the sexual orientation of the customer. A lot of my friends are outraged by the idea that laws could be passed to “protect religious freedoms” by legalizing discrimination. Almost happened in Arizona. 

I actually think these shops and services should be allowed to discriminate against homosexuals on the condition that they must hang a yellow star in their shop windows and websites. That way the rest of us will be able to tell which shops to boycott. I would hate to think that I in some way endorsed homophobia and bigotry by buying a cake. 

Maybe that’s why Mozilla fired its CEO – so all its users wouldn’t make an executive decision to flock over to Chrome. 

A lot of hard-line religious leaders are flabbergasted by this incident. I don’t think they see that having an anti-gay CEO is just like having a Nazi/KKK-affiliated CEO. They also tend to be very shocked that pro-LGBT public figures are perceived as heroes.

But getting back to business, refusing to decriminalize homosexual acts out of fear that one day they will not be allowed to refuse to provide services for homosexuals stems from a slippery slope paranoia. This comes from looking at the US. But if we slipped down the opposite slope, then everyone should be screaming that criminalizing homosexual acts is going to turn Singapore into Russia or Uganda. Unfortunately, global outrage, boycotting of the Sochi olympics and withdrawal of financial aid were not enough to persuade either of the offending countries to stop brutalizing the LGBT.

I think you have to deal with it. You can’t stop the good things from happening because you’re afraid bad things will happen. Otherwise you might support the extremist statement that “If we let girls go to school and learn independence, our religion and country will be destroyed”. Or the statement that “I will NEVER let my child start making his/her own decisions because they will one day make decisions that I do not agree with”.

So I’m afraid that I can’t accept the excuse that we should not give homosexuals the basic rights to live and love because it will one day threaten the rights of anti-gay individuals.