How our freedom dies

02/26/2014

“Religious Right Cheers a Bill Allowing Refusal to Serve Gays.”

Thus did The New York Times' headline describe the proposed Arizona law to permit businesses, on religious grounds, to deny service to same-sex couples.

Examples of intolerance provided by The Times: “In New Mexico, a photographer declined to take pictures of a lesbian couple's commitment ceremony. In Washington State, a florist would not provide flowers for a same-sex wedding. And in Colorado, a baker refused to make a cake for a party celebrating the wedding of two men.”

The question Gov. Jan Brewer faces? Should Christians, Muslims and Mormons who refuse, on religious grounds, to serve same-sex couples be treated as criminals? Or should Arizona leave them alone?

“Religious freedom,” said Daniel Mach of the ACLU to The Times, is “not a blank check to ... impose our faith on our neighbors.”

True. But who is imposing whose beliefs here?

What we are seeing in Arizona is what we have witnessed in America for half a century: the growing intolerance of those who preach tolerance and the corruption of the concept of civil rights.

We have seen the progression before.

In 1954, the Supreme Court declared that segregation in public schools was wrong and every black child must be allowed to attend his or her neighborhood school. By 1968, the court was demanding that white children be forcibly bused across entire cities to ensure an arbitrary racial balance.

Under the civil rights acts of the 1960s, businesses were told that in hiring, promotion, pay and benefits, black and white, men and women, must be treated alike. Equality of opportunity.

But soon that was no longer enough. We needed equality of result. Corporations were ordered to maintain extensive records of the race, gender, ethnicity and sexual preferences of their entire workforce to prove the companies were not guilty of discrimination.

Consider how far we have come: Scores of thousands of bureaucrats — academic, corporate, government — are on watch, overseeing our economy, patrolling our society, monitoring our behavior.

Suppose we repealed the civil rights laws and fired all the bureaucrats enforcing these laws. Does anyone think hotels, motels and restaurants, from D.C. to Texas, would stop serving black customers?

 Does anyone think there would again be signs sprouting up reading “whites” and “colored” on drinking foundations and restrooms?

Does anyone think restrictive covenants against Jews would be rewritten into contracts on houses? Does anyone think that bars and hotels would stop serving blacks and Hispanics?

Why do we need this vast army of bureaucrats? They exist to validate the slander that America is a racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic country that would revert to massive discrimination were it not for heroic progressives standing guard.

Last year, the Supreme Court struck down the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet, somehow, Mississippi still has more black elected officials than any other state.

If the conditions that called for the laws of the 1960s have ceased to exist, why do those laws still exist?

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