Theoretically, liberalism picks pluralism over public morality, nowhere more so than in the intimate realm of human sexuality.
But the regulatory state has gotten so large, and so powerful, with such extensive reach into Americans’ livelihoods, that the Left cannot resist using it to impose its sexual moral views on the rest of us.
Take Melissa and Aaron Klein, whose little Oregon bakery refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. It is not technically a crime to refuse to bake a gay wedding cake, so instead of being tried in a court of law, they were tried by the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries.
Why can gay bakers refuse to bake a Celebrate NOM (the National Organization for Marriage) cake, but Aaron and Melissa Klein must bake a gay wedding cake or pay the penalty? Because the regulatory state is now redirecting to this realm the powerful public-accommodations mechanisms that were strengthened to put an end to Jim Crow — the systematic, ugly attempt by powerful Southerners to deprive black people of equal opportunities in the economy and the culture.
For African Americans, this was a horrendous problem. In 1906, Mary Church Terrell, an Oberlin grad and the daughter of two ex-slaves who rose to be successful Memphis business owners, gave a speech at the United Women’s Club in Washington, D.C., where she explained:
As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, a stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head. . . . Indians, Chinamen, Filipinos, Japanese and representatives of any other dark race can find hotel accommodations, if they can pay for them. The colored man alone is thrust out of the hotels of the national capital like a leper.
As a colored woman I may walk from the Capitol to the White House ravenously hungry and abundantly supplied with money with which to purchase a meal, without finding a single restaurant in which I would be permitted to take a morsel of food . . .
As a colored woman, I cannot visit the tomb of the Father of this country . . . without being forced to sit in the Jim Crow section of an electric car . . .
Nothing (thankfully) like this is happening to gay people. There is no complex of the economically and culturally powerful seeking to prevent their free access to ordinary American society. They have not only the courts but also the corporations on their side. Not only does Walmart fund gay-pride parades, its CEO publicly opposed Arkansas’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Via: National Review
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