Their most recent cause for hysterical urgency is Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The left has gone absolutely bonkers attempting to paint that legislation as a license for Christians to discriminate against gays for sport and is smearing anyone who supports it as a reactionary bigot.
Don’t you long for those days when words had meaning? Now we have propagandists whose principal job is to deceitfully distort word meanings to promote their causes.
A few examples in the context of the issue at hand are “hate,” “homophobe,” “discrimination” and “anti-.” People who oppose same-sex marriage do not fear or hate people who are gay. They are not advocating discrimination against them, and they are not against them.
These calculated distortions have had an enormous impact on our culture, infecting even people who should know better. Now enshrined in our popular culture, these misrepresentations affect the way people think (which is the whole point, of course) and lead to imputed motives with no basis in fact.
Consider U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s unfortunate language in his opinion in the Windsor case, in which the court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional.
Kennedy said the government’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriages imposed a “stigma,” codified a “separate status” into law and “humiliate(d)” a certain group of people. He said, “The principal purpose and the necessary effect of this law are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage.”
Those were grossly unwarranted accusations. In fact, Kennedy’s reckless language could cause the exact harm he professed to be condemning, for he flagrantly stigmatized, humiliated and demeaned proponents of DOMA in presumptuously imputing motives to them they don’t possess.
Somewhat similarly, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, in walking back his position on Indiana’s law, said, “No one should be harassed or mistreated because of who they are, who they love or what they believe.”
That was a profoundly regrettable choice of words that only lends credence to the dishonest activists who are attempting to vilify people who support a law that protects one of this nation’s most basic and sacred freedoms, the freedom of religion. Under no reasonable construction of language can business owners’ refusal to perform services or sell products for events that celebrate causes that violate their religious beliefs be considered harassment.
The only people being harassed on this issue are the business owners, because of their religious beliefs.
The Indiana law doesn’t authorize businesses to deny services to gay people at will. Neither the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act nor any of the state RFRAs have been used as a license for merchants to refuse to do business with gays. But there is a qualitative difference between refusing to serve gays in general and declining to provide services for the very event that solemnizes their legal marriage.
We should expect better from Kennedy and Pence, but not White House press secretary Josh Earnest, who said the Indiana law “could reasonably be used to try to justify discriminating against somebody because of who they love.” That incendiary language completely distorts the motive of those who don’t want to service same-sex marriage ceremonies, and he knows it.
Source:http://cnsnews.com/commentary/david-limbaugh/lets-recognize-who-real-haters-are
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