Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
The Equality Act is making its way through Congress. I think it will become law. This will expand the scope of current anti-discrimination rules, to include sexual and gender categories.
It will be illegal to refuse to hire someone based on their stated preferences or identifying labels. Public restrooms will be open to biological members of the other sex.
Most importantly, for this article, the Equality Act denies any exemption due to religious conviction. If taken to court over it, no church, synagogue, or mosque would be allowed to appeal to First Amendment protections.
That bit is very interesting, completely aside from questions of sexual morality. It's interesting because it represents the government deciding between competing “rights.” The Equality Act will make religious freedom take a back seat to rights of sexual expression. This is a wonderful teaching opportunity regarding how we do politics.
Several questions should be asked and answered by every thinking individual.
What is a right? What rights do individuals have, and how do you know? Does “society” have some sort of collective right to anything? Again, how would you know?
Does government itself have any rights? What is government's job in relation to individual or societal rights? Whatever your answer, why do you think this?
Does civil government have a duty to keep people from speaking to each other uncivilly?
Does it have a right to tell business owners how to hire and fire employees, or what to pay them? Aside from recent history, what makes you believe it does?
When an individual claims to have a right that no one ever thought of before, how can you know whether that claim is legitimate? What if two individuals claim rights that conflict with each other?
The political Left has no coherent answers to these questions. And, in the ancient wisdom of Gomer Pyle: “Surprise! Surprise!” Neither does the Right.
Stop kidding yourselves. The Right is just as willing to impose its baseless morality on you as the Left is, but in different areas, to enrich different backers. This is what elections have become, where the spoils go to the winner, whose party may now implement its agenda at the point of a gun.
If you continue to cast votes for people who haven't thought for two seconds about any of these questions, you deserve what gets foisted on you.
Rights come from God. You can know what rights you have by studying the moral commandments of God. The commandment against murder means we all have a right to life. The law against theft means private property is valid and not to be harmed. The law against bearing false witness means you have a right to the truth.
As we continue in that sort of exercise, we'll find that some rights carry criminal penalties for their violation, while others are to be protected by non-governmental means like teaching and societal pressure.
My overall point here is that without the transcendent standard of morality given to us in the Bible, we are reduced to feeling our way along like blind folks. This should remind us of Christ's warning about what happens to those who follow the blind.
Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at: