Leadingchurch.com

Peter Enns blog

Vox

CT: Christians don’t want to stop serving their LGBTQ neighbors

Consider the irony when this complicity shoe is on the other foot. Last year Canadian mediareported the case of a gay couple requesting their money back from the jeweler who had made their wedding rings. The couple had liked the rings and the service they received, and they recommended the jeweler to their friends. But when they later discovered that the jeweler did not support gay marriage—he had posted a sign in his store that read, “The sanctity of marriage is under attack. Let’s keep marriage between a man and a woman”—the couple sought a refund. They didn’t want anyone with convictions such as this jeweler’s, they said, to have anything to do with their wedding.

The problem here was obviously the issue of complicity. The jeweler had in no way discriminated against the couple. “They were great to work with,” said the couple. The jeweler’s only sin was his moral conscience. While rainbow flags flew up and down the street in other businesses, the one small sign hanging on the wall of the jeweler’s shop was his undoing. He lost business and was trashed on social media. “I had to shut down the Facebook page,” he said, “because of so many hate emails and phone calls and just really nasty stuff.”

So here is the irony: For discriminating against the jeweler, based solely on his moral convictions, the gay couple was valorized, while the jeweler was punished. But conversely, had the jeweler refused to participate in their wedding due to those same convictions, the gay couple would still have been valorized and the jeweler trashed. Heads I win, tails you lose. This is the very definition of injustice. The only good thing that can be said about this episode is that the gay couple obviously understood the principle about even the jeweler being “complicit” in their wedding.

http://www.adfontes.ca/posts/post/article/why-is-gay-marriage-the-evangelical-rubicon/index.php

NYTimes

NYTimes

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/methodist-crisis/

http://religionnews.com/2016/07/15/why-do-many-nones-believe-in-life-after-death/

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-coming-christian-collapse/

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/evangelicals-all-in-for-trump/