“You know, the Ten Commandments, it says you can’t commit adultery; it says you need to honor your father and mother. If someone didn’t honor their parents or commit[ed] adultery, would you serve them?” This question was posed by CNN reporter Gary Tuchman to Georgia florist Melissa Jeffcoat, who had previously said she’d refuse to service a homosexual commitment ceremony. When she answered affirmatively and was pressed on why (supposedly) she’d serve adulterers and those dishonoring their parents but not homosexuals, she replied, “It’s just a different kind of sin to me. I just don’t believe in it.”
Tuchman surely thinks himself clever, and he did get the sound bite he wanted. He closed his segment with, “In these flower shops they’re happy to do business with you, but not so much if you tell them you’re gay.” And that was mild compared to Raw Story’s Arturo Garcia, who accused Jeffcoat of “hypocrisy.” It’s all very effective rhetorically, too, but also reflective of the illogical thinking characterizing our modern debates.
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First, Garcia apparently doesn’t understand the definition of “hypocrisy,” which is saying one thing while intending to do another. And there’s no record of Jeffcoat ever stating that she places all sins on the same plane. What Garcia perhaps means is that she’s being inconsistent (by his lights), but she’s actually quite consistent with Christian tradition. In fact, Thomas Aquinas — considered a church father and major figure of the faith — said himself that homosexual behavior was worse than even adultery. And, of course, no one actually believes that all wrong acts, even within the same category, are equally egregious. The law recognizes this as well, which is why it differentiates between murder and manslaughter and defines different degrees of each. But this isn’t the main point.
Rather, Tuchman might have slipped it by most of his audience and even perhaps himself, but his analogy was not at all analogous. What parallels a homosexual “commitment ceremony” is not merely serving adulterers and disrespectful children, but servicing events designed to celebrate adultery or disrespect of parents. And it’s safe to say that pious Christians would be opposed to that just as they are to participating in faux weddings.
In fact, unless Jeffcoat hasn’t been in business very long, probability dictates she has served all the groups in question. Customers don’t come with labels stating “Adulterer,” “Disrespectful Brat,” or “Homosexual” anymore than “Murderer” or “Rapist” (though it might be beneficial if reporters wore, when relevant, the label “Liberal”). All kinds of people eventually come through your door, and no business conducts a sin or sexuality test before selling a bouquet of flowers.
In reality, the aforementioned proper analogy likely wouldn’t even occur to a reporter such as Tuchman — even if he were trying to be sincere. For we don’t hear about events celebrating adultery or progeny disrespect, and not even individuals embodying those sins consider hosting such things. These people just do what they do, and, with “open marriages” being quite rare, adultery is actually still kept in the closet. And if they did celebrate such things, it’s hard to imagine the government persecuting businessmen who refused to participate in the celebration.
This brings us to perhaps the most important point: Virtually everyone operates under the assumption that the truth is the precise opposite of what it is. It’s not believing Christians who are singling out homosexuality.
Everyone else is.
I wrote about this last year, pointing out that homosexual activists are actually asking for special treatment, for a special dispensation, from Christian teaching. I then explained:
Is the church supposed to say adultery is a sin, fornication is a sin, self-gratification is a sin, viewing pornography is a sin, but homosexuality is, what? A lifestyle choice, sort of like living on a houseboat?
This would be comical to anyone who didn’t fail at mastering childhood categorization problems (i.e., what things belong together?). It would be like saying that devil’s food cake didn’t belong with sugar cookies, petits fours, Napoleons, and ladyfingers in the category of desserts because it’s the favorite of some corpulent, Jabba the Hut-looking slob who’ll feel better about himself if it’s classified as a vegetable.
So in essence, what homosexuality activists are asking is that the church scrap all of its sexual teaching to accommodate their wishes. It doesn’t matter that the teaching is the product of ages of thought, scholarship, discernment, and divine revelation; that it’s promulgated in numerous official documents such as Humanae Vitae; or that it’s considered infallible [by many], as it reflects Truth. You want it gone? We’ll get right on that for ya’.
In fact, here’s a thought exercise. Imagine there was a society wherein adultery became such a high-profile cause that adulterers did celebrate their behavior, were labeled a “protected group,” and that businessmen were being punished for not servicing their celebratory events. Would you say that the businessmen who resisted were hung up? Or that this hypothetical society was hung up on adultery?
Obsessed people generally mistake resistance to their obsession as obsession. It’s common today to ask Christians and other traditionalists, accusingly, “Why are you so hung-up on homosexuality? Why do you talk about it so much? Are you a latent homosexual?!” But it’s much like asking a man who merely raises his hands to block as an attacker incessantly rains down blows upon him, “Why are you getting so violent?!” Christians aren’t the ones who took homosexuality out of the closet; they aren’t the side trying to give this one group special status and this one behavior a special dispensation. They are simply playing defense. Yet it is they who are called “offensive.”
