Wedding Rights – Defining Discrimination: Part 2

I spent my last post establishing what it means to be tolerant, and said it meant “respecting other people’s right to have their own view, right or wrong.” I also spoke about the importance of mutual respect, regardless of whether we agree with each other, and why we should not force someone to agree with us. Let’s go back and look at Ms. Stutzman’s case a little more closely in light of all this.

I have said that, while Jeb does not have the right to disrespect Sally, he should not be required to legitimize her behavior by lying about what he believes. The Washington Supreme Court recognizes that this is the issue at stake; it ruled that Ms. Stutzman was not legitimizing homosexuality by participating in this wedding any more than she would be legitimizing Islam by participating in an Islamic wedding.

The problem with this ruling is that it ignores the fundamental point at stake. The disagreement between Islam and Christianity does not derive from beliefs about marriage; they are entirely separate systems of belief. Christianity (and Islam, for that matter)’s quarrel with gay marriage, however, is precisely whether homosexual behavior is legitimate and thus entitled to the moniker of marriage. Whether the requirement to provide flowers as a business owner for such a wedding constitutes an infringement on Ms. Stutzman’s conscience thus remains an open question, depending on how you define ‘expressing support’ or ‘legitimizing’ or legal versus religious marriage.

My impression is that Ms. Stutzman and those like her are not against the plaintiffs per se. That is, they have no quarrel with these people’s natures, their natural inclinations, or even their right to behave as they please. Their intention is not to delegitimize the plaintiffs as people. Their objection, rather, is coerced cooperation with same-sex marriage as a legitimization of same-sex behavior, which they see as wrong. Thus, we have record of Ms. Stutzman cheerfully doing business with Mr. Ingersoll in the past, with awareness of his sexual orientation, and differentiating not based on the client, but rather on the event. Even Huffington Post acknowledged this, but then changed its tune to insist that she was nevertheless discriminating based on person.

Yes, the defendants in these cases think some very strong urges of the plaintiffs should not be given into, but they would presumably say the same about lust, certain fantasies, playboy, porn, or sex outside of marriage, at least one of which will probably arouse strong urges in each of us at some point in our lives. The defendants are not claiming to be better than anyone else; they are simply upholding a particular belief based on their understanding of the world. If even this right to disagree seems like too much to give them, perhaps we need to reconsider our level of respect for other people.

Yes, they believe people with homosexual urges have problems – stay with me here – but this is not surprising, because they believe all people have problems. You, reading this. Me, sitting here. That’s, in a way, the entire point of Christianity: that we’re all broken, and we can’t fix ourselves. Take it from someone about to graduate from Harvard who’s always getting complimented on how put-together she is: we are all messed up; some of us just wear it better than others. That’s why, according to Christianity, there’s no bar you have to reach in order to get to God; he comes to you.

I’m don’t mean to preach; I just want to point out that as far as I can tell, Ms. Stutzman doesn’t claim that these people are worse than anyone else, including herself. She isn’t disparaging. She’s disagreeing. That’s why, when the government fined her, she described it as their “telling [her] what to think.” I don’t know how all this affects her duties as a business owner, but I know agreement shouldn’t be forced, and I think we should all be very careful of bandying about the word ‘discrimination’ until we’re sure we’ve agreed on what it means.