Would you ever inflict severe mental duress upon an elderly woman and potentially ruin her livelihood just to score an ideological victory that would result in no substantive change to your quality of life? For sane people, the answer should be a firm “no.” However, in the case of two gay men who sued Arlene’s Flowers for declining to make them a wedding bouquet on religious grounds, sanity is of no concern.
Increasingly, politics is taking precedence over people in the United States. The willingness to impart harm upon their neighbors in the name of petty disagreements over political abstractions threatens to tear at the very fabric that holds society together. Two gay men from eastern Washington participating in unwarranted legal action is just among the latest iterations of this worrying trend.
To set the stage, Arlene’s Flowers is owned and operated by Barronelle Stutzman, an elderly Southern Baptist woman who had accommodated the two men who would later sue her (knowing they were gay) for nine years prior to the incident. When the men asked Stutzman to create a floral arrangement for their wedding ceremony, she refused. Understandably, Stutzman was uncomfortable participating in an event that conflicted with her religious views — an act which she believes would have constituted an endorsement of gay marriage. Stutzman cordially recommended several nearby florists who would accommodate the couple. My family home is roughly 6 miles away from Arlene’s; I can confirm there are establishments in the area that would have happily made arrangements for a gay wedding.
Rather than choosing to live and let live, the two men, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, plunged Stutzman into a legal and financial hell. What followed was a barrage of legal fines and state-endorsed mandates for Stutzman to eschew her faith and provide services for gay weddings in the future. People flooded her Google reviews page with negative reviews, and she was branded a discriminator by the state of Washington.
To make matters worse, our allegedly conservative Supreme Court recently rejected Stutzman’s petition for cert to review Washington state’s clear infringement on her religious freedom.
In a reasonable world, the two men would have taken their business to one of the other florists recommended by Stutzman, and that would have been the end of it. We, unfortunately for Stutzman, do not live in that world.
Getting flowers arranged by one florist or another shouldn’t make or break your wedding. When the personal cost of simply going somewhere else to receive a service is so low, why would you ever choose to impose such a massive burden on someone else? To put it mildly, it’s just not neighborly to levy life-altering lawsuits over minor inconveniences.
Perhaps the cruelty is the point.
Christians only have one body through which to practice their faith. Gay people have hundreds of bakers and florists who can accommodate them. A society where the latter would go out of their way to compel the former to provide them, against their will, with a commonly provided nonessential service is not healthy.
To be clear, gay people are not the only ones acting like this, nor do all gay people agree with conduct such as this. Seemingly every day, we see online campaigns aimed at destroying people for minor mistakes or instances of political incorrectness. Derailing entire lives for doing something dumb as a teenager or deviating from the liberal consensus is not normal, nor should it be accepted as such.
Start treating people like people. Understand that whatever your ideology is, defending it is not worth the destruction of someone else.
