If you hang around enough Christian conservative web pages long enough, you will inevitably stumble across stories of oppression regarding the LGBT community. In the land of Christian conservatives, the real oppression in America is the horde of gays coming for Evangelical freedoms.
The examples pointed to are often nebulous, such as the way gays are not even willing to consider that they herald the apocalypse and are agents of Satan sent to drag America into the depths of depravity. If the conservatives are supposed to accept all points of view, after all, then supporters of same-sex marriage should at least think about how much God hates them.
More concretely and recently, grievances have shifted. Now, it’s transgender women demanding they be able to use the women’s bathroom who are infringing on conservative rights. This argument is flawed, but it takes a bit more effort to deconstruct than an eye roll.
In short, you’ve probably shared a bathroom with a trans person and didn’t notice. If binary trans people were threatened with felony charges for using the bathroom of their identified gender, you might make more cisgender people uncomfortable when men with developed facial hair are forced into the women’s room. The argument also ignores any discomfort to trans people through these policies — if the goal is really to maximize everyone's comfort and safety, then you would think that would come up more often than it does.
The most difficult argument to refute, and one that I thought had crawled back in to the shadows, revolves around wedding cakes. Every so often, some baker or florist in a state or county with anti-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation will get sued for refusing to make a cake for a same-sex couple. They will cite religious liberty and the courts will, inevitably, rule against them. There can be lofty fines attached.
Is this not blatant discrimination against Christians? Aren’t Christian conservatives being targeted in their own country?
To start with, I take issue with the exclusive focus on the so-called discrimination against Christians in this argument, given that the situation only arises because they have discriminated against someone else whose rights we are supposed to brush aside. After all, the right of business owners to deny service based on their religious beliefs has been tested before in this very state.
Suing someone for being unwilling to make a cake is not something I would personally do, and the ethics of it are indeed questionable. But the laws that allow these lawsuits to go forward are critically important.
In many cases, what is being denied is not just cake or flowers. It can potentially apply to food, shelter, clothing, housing, transportation and medical care. What happens if a small town only has one doctor, who refuses to care for a trans person? Can a very conservative landlord turn away a married couple because they are gay? Could a bank deny them a loan if it would be used to fund a wedding ceremony or a home?
Every time someone argues that businesses should have the right to deny service to LGBT people for no reason other than their sexual orientation or gender identity, they are arguing that these situations are acceptable and morally just and that, in fact, the really intolerant people are those who complain about potentially being denied access to basic human rights.
What it comes down to is this: if civil rights can be ignored at the discretion of the powerful, the marginalized have no rights at all.
I won’t apologize for not tolerating that.