Thoughts in a Haystack

When in danger,
When in doubt,
Run in circles
Scream and shout!

Al Mohler is running in such tight circles he is in danger of disappearing up his own ass.

It seems:

The advocates of same-sex marriage and the more comprehensive goals of the LGBT movement assured the nation that nothing would be fundamentally changed just if people of the same gender were allowed to marry one another. We knew that couldn’t be true, and now the entire nation knows.

What's changed? The Indiana “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” was shot down … big time. But according to Al, it was just the same law that has been on the Federal books since 1993 and almost unanimously passed by Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton himself!

Except it wasn't the same law ... but why be picky?

But according to Al:

The real issue is the fact that the secular Left has decided that religious liberty must now be reduced, redefined or relegated to a back seat in the culture.

How does he come to that conclusion? Why because the New York Times Editorial Board had the temerity to say:

The freedom to exercise one’s religion is not under assault in Indiana, or anywhere else in the country. Religious people — including Christians, who continue to make up the majority of Americans — may worship however they wish and say whatever they like.

To Al, that's not enough:

There you see religious liberty cut down to freedom of worship. The freedom to worship is most surely part of what religious liberty protects, but religious liberty is not limited to what happens in a church, a mosque, a temple or a synagogue. That editorial represents religious liberty redefined right before our eyes.

But, perhaps not strangely for a Southern Baptist, Al doesn't mention the next paragraph in the Times editorial:

But religion should not be allowed to serve as a cover for discrimination in the public sphere. In the past, racial discrimination was also justified by religious beliefs, yet businesses may not refuse service to customers because of their race. Such behavior should be no more tolerable when it is based on sexual orientation.

What more does Al want, anyway?

His other evidence of this is a couple of columns by opinion writer Frank Bruni at the Times. The first, back in January, where Bruni said “churches have been allowed to adopt broad, questionable interpretations of a “ministerial exception” to anti-discrimination laws that allow them to hire and fire clergy as they wish,” and another recently where he says “debate about religious liberty should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.”

The problem here is that, as part of the vast “secular Left” conspiracy against religion, I don't agree with Bruni. The “ministerial exception” is entirely appropriate to our constitutional scheme and necessary to keep government out of the freedom of religion of our citizens. And, while Bruni has every free speech right to talk to theists about freeing religion from past superstition and prejudice, government (to the extent he even suggested it did) has no role in that conversation.

To try to attribute to a large movement like liberalism and secularism the motives of the New York Times Editorial Board or of Frank Bruni is rather like me saying that all Christians want to kill gays because some Christians advocate stoning gays to death.

Is Al willing to take the views of a few as if they are his own?

I didn't think so!