Gay wedding cakes debate fueled by chimera
As the U.S. Supreme Court mulls the national debate over whether anti-homosexual (read: fundamentalist Christian) bakers can be involuntarily compelled to create gay wedding cakes, we tend to lose site of the dispute’s real genesis.
For a good overview of the gay-cakes issue, read conservative op-ed writer David Brooks column, “How Not to Advance Gay Marriage,” this week in The New York Times.
Obviously, this clash is fueled by citizens’ conflicting religious and human needs and rights. And by the meaning of the Constitution’s First Amendment, which codifies religious freedom for all citizens and largely maroons government from the equation. But the Constitution also prescribes full equality for all citizens, and in the modern era that equality has been codified by a number of states to specifically prohibit discrimination against people for gender-related bias.
The complicating factor is that fundamentalist Christians, as is the gay-wary, refusnik baker at the heart of the high-court case, believe that writings several thousand years old reveal that God himself condemns homosexuality as a deadly sin. As with all such claims in so-called “sacred” books based on unverifiable supernatural assumptions, this one is, at best, speculative.
Yet, here we are, with America’s most august legal gatekeepers seriously considering whether it should be legal for one citizen to discriminate against another for reasons whose assumptions can never be corroborated in the real world. All the plaintiffs can realistically do is point to ancient writings and our nation’s commitment to religious freedom.
The problem of course is when one person’s religious freedom disregards and assaults another’s also-universal human rights as an American citizen. For the public baker to reject a gay couple’s cake request necessarily requires rejection of a fundamental American right not to be discriminated against.
In its fair and rigorous deliberations, the Supreme Court will ultimately decide if refusing to make gay wedding cakes should be considered legal. To do so, a majority of justices will have to rule that religious rights trump arguably more fundamental human rights.
But for humanists, the tragedy of this continuing debate is that, at heart, it is not about public policy rationally discussed. It’s that it reveals we are still in thrall to very questionable ideas supposedly derived from imagined invisible divinities millennia ago.
Ideas which, as we’ve seen, inevitably lead us to view cruelty as moral.
