Your rights and my rights
In this post, a conservative American wonders whether the drive for homosexual equality will end up criminalising Christianity. He cites a recent column from Melanie Phillips in the UK about the alleged drive to criminalise Christianity in Europe.
There are a lot of big issues tied up here. There is a sense in which it is no more possible for gays to have a dialogue with, say, the Catholic Church than it is for Jews to have a dialogue with Nazis. You cannot have a dialogue with those for whom your subhuman status and the perverted nature of your aspirations is a premise, not a conclusion.
Secondly, if it is basic to your understanding of your religion that it is absolutely essential that homosexuals not be treated as real people with the same rights as everyone else, then you do have a problem. It is not a problem that public policy should concern itself with in the slightest-no more than it should concern itself with those who believe it essential that the law not treat Jews, or blacks or women or whoever as real people with the same rights as everyone else-but you do have a problem.
Yet there is also a problem with “progressives” taking up one of the Catholic Church’s most noxious doctrines-error has no rights-and applying to those who disagree with them: the rednecks have no speech rights principle of modern progressivist jurisprudence. It is certainly possible to point to the cases of secularists and progressivists trying to drive traditional Christians out of public space. The Rocco Buttligione case in the EU. An attempt to extend a no believing Catholic bar on holding public office to the UK. The Pakistani pastors case locally. The case Melanie Phillips points to above.
Just as it is possible to point to campaigns by traditional Christians to drive gays and representations of gays out of public spaces. (Yet again, the difference between religious believers and other believers proves to not be a morally or intellectually serious divide.)
There is an answer, it is called freedom of speech. The answer would be lot clearer if “progressives” would stop turning into freedom of speech’s most effective contemporary enemies.
That Christian opposition to equal rights for homosexuals is used an excuse to anathematise views which dissent from current progressivist orthodoxies is sad but makes no difference to the case for equal rights. It just emphasises how equal rights extend to speech rights as well.
There are a lot of big issues tied up here. There is a sense in which it is no more possible for gays to have a dialogue with, say, the Catholic Church than it is for Jews to have a dialogue with Nazis. You cannot have a dialogue with those for whom your subhuman status and the perverted nature of your aspirations is a premise, not a conclusion.
Secondly, if it is basic to your understanding of your religion that it is absolutely essential that homosexuals not be treated as real people with the same rights as everyone else, then you do have a problem. It is not a problem that public policy should concern itself with in the slightest-no more than it should concern itself with those who believe it essential that the law not treat Jews, or blacks or women or whoever as real people with the same rights as everyone else-but you do have a problem.
Yet there is also a problem with “progressives” taking up one of the Catholic Church’s most noxious doctrines-error has no rights-and applying to those who disagree with them: the rednecks have no speech rights principle of modern progressivist jurisprudence. It is certainly possible to point to the cases of secularists and progressivists trying to drive traditional Christians out of public space. The Rocco Buttligione case in the EU. An attempt to extend a no believing Catholic bar on holding public office to the UK. The Pakistani pastors case locally. The case Melanie Phillips points to above.
Just as it is possible to point to campaigns by traditional Christians to drive gays and representations of gays out of public spaces. (Yet again, the difference between religious believers and other believers proves to not be a morally or intellectually serious divide.)
There is an answer, it is called freedom of speech. The answer would be lot clearer if “progressives” would stop turning into freedom of speech’s most effective contemporary enemies.
That Christian opposition to equal rights for homosexuals is used an excuse to anathematise views which dissent from current progressivist orthodoxies is sad but makes no difference to the case for equal rights. It just emphasises how equal rights extend to speech rights as well.