Reply #42: Christians are crying "oppression" [View All]

[Zomby Woof]

The oppressors' first refuge is to claim they are the oppressed.

There was a twisted op-ed in the LA Times today about how gay marriages impinge on 'freedom of religion'. Last time I checked, there was no mention of a god in the Constitution, state or federal. There IS the 14th amendment. As for the 1st amendment, if people loving each other and committing to marriage, regardless of gender, have some magical powers in stopping another's constitutionally-protected practice of deity-worship, I am at a loss to explain it. Let freedom ring for both deity-worship-and-ritual-observance choice AND life partner choice! One does not need to negate the other.

Oh! Wait! I get it! The freedom to ostracize and deny rights to others is now a measure of 'religious freedom'. Shit, looking at Saudi Arabia, freedom of religion is busting out all over in that country. Or not.

I though religious freedom meant worshiping or not worshiping the deity or deities of one's choice or non-choice. Or observing the rituals of same. Or the absence of rituals. And throw in the parts about the prescribed dogmas one must adhere to (when convenient, of course), and the proscriptions masked as spiritual purity and "god's will", when they are actually just rationalizations of bigotry. So if the dogma of one's religion commands them to disparage homosexuality or the sanction of marriage for homosexuals, by all means, they are free to disparage. But that same freedom does not give one the concurrent freedom to deny others their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

You can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, and you can't stop homosexuals from marrying just because some desert-dwelling crank wrote it down on some scrolls 2,000 years ago. The guys in the powdered wigs over 200 years ago were, mercifully for us, products of the Enlightenment and not the Bronze Age.

Let freedom ring!