Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Adams listen to the dictates of their consciences. This is a good thing, and more Americans should try it.
Springsteen believes that if he were to play a concert in North Carolina, it would imply that he somehow approves of its controversial new “bathroom law.” And so he will not conduct a planned business transaction with North Carolinians by playing his music in their state.
Adams, too, has taken a stand on principle, cancelling a concert in Mississippi because the state passed a different law which offends his conscience.
Sometimes, taking a personal stand and saying “no” results in a loss of business. Right or wrong, no one should argue that Adams or Springsteen are obliged to provide services where it would violate their consciences. Neither Congress nor any state legislature or city council should (or could) compel them to provide entertainment where it would force them to set what they consider a bad moral example or violate deeply held beliefs.
But having said all that and given the entertainers their due, one also has to say that their reasoning is pitiful and their stances hypocritical. The right they were exercising, to live by their consciences, is at the heart of the laws to which they took offense.
Neither the North Carolina law nor the Mississippi law places new burdens on anyone or deprives them of rights they enjoyed hitherto. Rather, each merely preserves a status quo to which opponents have principled objections.
The noteworthy effect of the North Carolina law is to prevent local governments from forcing women to tolerate men using public restrooms designated for women. The law forces city governments to accommodate the still-widespread belief that biological differences between men and women matter at least enough to justify (for example) a restaurant owner’s choice to arrange that members of each sex can go to the bathroom without being joined there by members of the opposite sex. The North Carolina law does not stop anyone from installing unisex bathrooms if they wish to do so.
The Mississippi law cuts a bit more against the grain of current public opinion, but it has a similar idea at heart.
Several unpleasant incidents have occurred in various parts of the country since courts began broadening the concept of marriage beyond its traditional meaning. Business owners have been financially penalized by government for refusing to do work that they think would endorse same-sex marriage.
People who continue to believe in traditional, sacramental marriage, exclusively between one man and one woman, are now a minority in this country. But they are a big minority, and they hew to a belief that President Obama claimed to agree with only five years ago. Perhaps unlike him, they hold that view sincerely. Many of them believe that they would be setting a bad example and acting against their sincere, humane and civilized convictions if they put their imprimatur on same-sex nuptials. In some states, Catholic adoption agencies have been given no choice but to shut down or else violate their belief in the primacy of the traditional family and the need to place children within such families.
The Mississippi law to which Adams objects seeks to forestall such situations before they arise in that state. It establishes that governments in Mississippi may not punish churches, religious adoption agencies, or (in the classic case) a florist or a baker who believes that catering to a same-sex wedding represents a personal endorsement he or she does not want to give.
In short, the Mississippi law secures for everyone, not just for celebrities, the right to refuse to deliver a service on grounds of conscience. This is the freedom Adams and Springsteen exercised, as was, and always should be, their right.
For many decades, the central demand from those seeking to change the sexual mores of our society was for tolerance — live and let live, don’t impose your morals on me. But now that that battle has been won, the victors reject tolerance, discarding it as an obsolete tactic rather than a fundamental principle. The sad result is an uglier culture and the need once again to fight against intolerance. Freedom of conscience should be respected.
