Christian Living

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David Mullins and Charlie Craig, a gay couple, is pursuing a discrimination complaint against Masterpiece Cakeshop, a Colorado bakery owned by Jack Phillips. On one side of the argument is the complaint of discrimination on the other religious freedom and intrusion into the rights of business to operate in a free market.

This story, one of many, has sparked national debate with pundits & commentators in the media, legislators in the halls of government and citizens in their homes. The voices are rising, with indignation and fervor drowning out each other as each camp fortifies their positions and are attempting to rally supporters to their cause.

As a Christian man and a citizen of America this issue first filled with me confusion and conflict. And when this happens I always return to first principles, the core of my convictions and work from there to attempt to reach clarity. When I do this I come to the conclusion that, as a Christian and an American, I can claim both positions without hypocrisy or duality.

As an American I start with the first principles of self-government we enjoy in the United States, that we are all endowed with certain inalienable rights, such as life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If this is true then no one has the right to rule another without their consent. This principle stems from the Christian world view that all mankind has value and that as such all are born into the world with rights that come from an authority higher than governments. This is what the inalienable distinction means, that those rights cannot be granted or repealed by man or the agencies of man. They can however be surrendered.

As such I have the right to live with liberty and self-interest. I have an inalienable right to choose and I may choose how to exercise and experience my life as seems best to me so long as doing so does not interfere with the rights of another. In simple words I may choose to swing my fist so long as I do not make contact with another person. I also do not have an obligation to subjugate my rights to anyone nor am I empowered to subjugate anyone else’s rights to me.

On the question of tolerance, a word much used in these resent days, I must reason that demanding tolerance from me is not liberty and not that far from tyranny. No one has the right to tell me what I need tolerate or who need tolerate me. Tolerance is also never the fulcrum for change. It has always been the intolerant who pit themselves against forces they deem worthy of defeating. Slavery was intolerable to William Wilberforce and be spent his life defeating it. Inequality was intolerant to Martin King and he gave his life fighting for it. Nazi domination was intolerable to nations and was defeated. In those three examples it was the tolerant that appeased, doing nothing. I believe those causes were worth fighting for, but to do so I then must accept that intolerance is a virtue in and of itself that lends itself to a free persons right to liberty and insurrection. Forcing anyone to accept that which they deem unacceptable is the very essence of tyranny.

On the question of discrimination I must ask, when did the freedom to discriminate become something to feared or be represented as the activity of the ignorant. When did the activity of discrimination become a default violation of anyone's rights, civil or otherwise? It seems reasonable to me that as a free person I cannot exercise that freedom without making choices and choice always includes discrimination of one thing over another. I chose whom I will associate with, what morality I deem righteous, foods to eat and an endless manifest of discriminatory choices.

The conflict between David Mullins, Charlie Craig and Jack Phillips seems to be that Mr. Mullins and Mr. Craig believe that Mr. Phillips’s exercising of his discriminatory choice on who he wishes to serve in his business is an unlawful act because it is based on their sexual orientation which Mr. Phillips is opposed to because of his religious world views. Their desire to be served, it is argued, trumps the desires of the service provider and that tolerance was expected and is now being demanded. This to me violates all of the first principles of inalienable rights.

Now as a Christian I must return to the first principles of what Christ, the head of the faith, stated when he was asked which of the laws of God were the most important. He answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself" On this it would seem to me that Mr. Phillips’s may well be exercising his rights as a free American but he has violated Christ’s law in doing so. Additionally if Mr. Phillips exclusion of Mr. Mullins and Mr. Craig because their lifestyle violates his religious convictions it would seem unlikely to me that Mr. Phillips could in good conscious serve anyone without hypocrisy. For as any Christian should be able to tell you, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Could Mr. Phillips serve a wife abuser, adulterer, drunkard or atheist and not serve a homosexual without himself violating his core beliefs? I cannot reason a way he could do so in good conscience. Should then Mr. Phillips pack up his store altogether and perhaps seek a quiet life of isolation and meditation? Perhaps, if his religious convictions are as important to him as he claims. But there is nothing in inalienable rights that excludes hypocrisy which would compel him to do so.

However I believe what Mr. Phillips is actually doing is making a political statement wrapped in the cloth of Christianity. I fully support his freedom to do so and see no need to separate a person’s religion from their politics. There is also nothing that I can find, in law which disqualifies a person’s views or voice just because those views are rooted in their faith. Mr. Phillips has, as I can reason, every right refuse service to anyone inside of the law and his reasoning or motivation for doing not a disqualifier.

I ask your indulgence here because I cannot help but walk on a short tangent on what I consider to be a red herring accusation in the media around this issue and the recent events in Arizona’s attempt to pass a religious freedom bill. The history of Jim Crow laws is being brought into the fray and being compared to the religious freedom bill. I see this to be a false accusation and unfair comparison. The Jim Crow laws were mandates of moral behavior by the state and enforced upon the people with consequences for disobedience. The religious freedom bill is the liberation of consequences by the action of moral behavior by a person. One is free to judge a person’s moral decisions but not the freedom to make them. Where Jim Crow laws mandated how a business will conduct its affairs, this bill seems to do the inverse.

Here is an example of an actual Jim Crow law.

“It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.”

Here is what is a better, albeit unnecessary, law.

“It shall be lawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, where white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment. It shall also be lawful to conduct a restaurant business that has no policy of segregation of clients and for any such establishment to be positioned directly adjacent to a business that follows the before mentioned.”

I claim that law is unnecessary because I content that the free market solves more of these types of problems than government can. These types of laws are an unnecessary restriction where free people have the power of choice and the power of influence to the market place with their wallets. Those types of laws protect powerless victims and embracing freedom is supposed to excise that classification. It was the boycott of the buses that ignited the changed of seating policy after Rosa Parks not the Civil Rights bill. The collective power private citizen exercising their ability to influence with their feet and their wallets should not be undervalued. He who refuses to offer services or goods to anyone creates a golden opportunity for someone else to capitalize on unexploited market share.

Additionally there is no force, outside of government, which compels anyone to participate in the market place. I can’t force anyone to purchase a good or service from me. I also am not forced to provide a good or service to anyone. I am free to thrive or decline, do what is required to do either and bear the consequences of both. There were once two groceries in my town. One owned by a proud racist the other not. One lost his business not by decree but by lack of customers.

I conclude that as an American Christian I find no contradiction in defending the right of Mr. Phillips to choose whom he serves and to stand up for the rights of all free people to do the same. I also don’t see how a Christian could faithfully conduct their business by what I reason to be an inferior standard from what Christ gave his followers. Discrimination such as this can only lead to two places; A lower number of customers in your business and a diminished capacity to reach out to those who have not yet accepted Christ into their lives.

It just seems like bad business and unloving.

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