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Anorak News | Religious Arizona Business Owners Can Legally Refuse To Serve Gays, Jews, Satanists, Muslims And Other Christians

Religious Arizona Business Owners Can Legally Refuse To Serve Gays, Jews, Satanists, Muslims And Other Christians

by | 21st, February 2014

Peter and Hazelmary Bull (centre) with Christian demonstrators outside Bristol County Court. Mr and Mrs Bull are appearing at the court, where they are being sued by a homosexual couple for refusing to allow them to share a double bed in their Cornish hotel.

Peter and Hazelmary Bull (centre) with Christian demonstrators outside Bristol County Court. Mr and Mrs Bull are appearing at the court, where they are being sued by a homosexual couple for refusing to allow them to share a double bed in their Cornish hotel.

 

IT is now legal to refuse to serve gays in Arizona shops and hotels – but only if it offends your religious beliefs.

State senators voted Wednesday to let businesses refuse to serve gays based on owners’ “sincerely held” religious beliefs. The 17-13 vote along party lines, with Republicans in the majority, came after supporters defeated an attempt to extend existing employment laws that bar discrimination based on religion and race to also include sexual orientation.

Wow, indeed. Bigotry is ok so long as it complies with rules you believe in. We’re all religious now.

This is intolerance dressed up as equality.

Arizona’s Sen. Steve Yarbrough, R-Chandler explains:

“This bill is not about discrimination. It’s about preventing discrimination against people who are clearly living out their faith.”

Yarborough is the Executive Director of the Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization. He was a co-founder and served on the school board for Valley Christian High School from 1981-2005.

Sen. Yarbrough leads a bipartisan group of legislators and citizen group leaders known as the Arizona Values Action Team which supports public policy that is pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, pro-school choice and pro-religious liberty.

 

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He is not alone:

“We are trying to protect people’s religious liberties,” said Rep. Steve Montenegro, R-Litchfield Park. “We don’t want the government coming in and forcing somebody to act against their religious sacred faith beliefs or having to sell out if you are a small-business owner.”

As he notes, “it could soon be legal for Satanists to discriminate against Christians in Arizona.”

But we can see the other side of the coin, no?

John Holbook talked about the Christian couple who refused top book a gay couple into the same room at their hotel:

Yet, as the systematic unequal treatment of gays has ended, so another problem has grown. One pernicious social force has been replaced by another: the willingness of the state to outlaw minority or eccentric views and behaviours. State-backed oppression has yielded to state-backed intolerance.

The Bulls have been hauled before the courts and told they can no longer practise what they preach. To deny a couple the right to make a living in a manner consistent with their Christian values is draconian. The Bulls’ fate is similar to that of Lillian Ladele, an Islington marriage registrar, and Gary McFarlane, a Relate counsellor, who were both sacked after declining to provide their professional services to lesbians and gays. Equality laws did for them all…

Equality laws have significantly expanded the state’s power. For every Christian couple hauled over the hot coals of discrimination law there are others who nowadays fear to say or act as they think fit. A few hurt feelings would be a small price to pay for the liberty that comes from being able to speak and act freely.

Andrew Sullivan says its anti-Christian:

If there was one aspect of organized religion that Jesus opposed, it was its attempt to draw lines around the unclean, the marginalized and the sinners. Among his radical acts was immersing himself with sinners of all sorts – prostitutes, lepers, and collaborators with an occupying power. Segregation – the placing of a group of unholy people outside of mainstream interaction – was anathema to Jesus and should be to all Christians. To construct a legal regime in which those people are fair game for outright ostracism and segregation is a disgusting inversion of both democratic and Christian values.

It’s what Julie Burchill terms intersectionality:

Intersectionality may well sound like some unfortunate bowel complaint resulting in copious use of a colostomy bag, and indeed it does contain a large amount of ordure. Wikipedia defines it as ‘the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities; specifically, the study of the interactions of multiple systems of oppression or discrimination’, which seems rather mature and dignified…  Every thought is an ism and every person an ist in the insania of intersectionality, where it is always winter and never Christmas…

Intersectionality believes that there is ‘no such thing as society’ — just various special interests. In my opinion, we only become truly brave, truly above self-interest, when fighting for people different from ourselves. Intersectionality, like identity politics before it, is pure narcissism. Though it reminds us ceaselessly to ‘check our privilege’, intersectionality is the silliest privilege of them all, a gang of tools and twats tiptoeing around others’ finer feelings rather than getting stuck in, mucking in, like proper mates — the ultimate privilege, which is to serve each other with collective love and action.

Oh, brave new world…

 



Posted: 21st, February 2014 | In: Politicians, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink