I just read a newspaper article in an LGBT publication about how Texas passed a “terrible” law allowing private religious adoption agencies to refuse to place children with people with whom they have serious religious or moral objections. This is supposed to be terrible because of course gay couples need the government to use force of law to make sure any adoption agency anywhere doesn’t “discriminate” by refusing to place a child with gay parents.
Is there anything wrong with placing children with gay parents? I honestly don’t know, I haven’t looked into it. Should there be laws prohibiting placing children with gay parents? I don’t think so. But on the other side of the coin, neither should there be laws compelling that we place children with families with whom we have profound religious or moral objections.
Everyone must be legally free to exercise their own values and act according to those values. If gay people want to convince you they’re fit to raise adopted kids then they actually must… convince you. These issues are won and lost in the sphere of public debate. If gays do not bother arguing their own value to the “bigots” who dislike them, then they’ve already lost.
Who has a legal right to enforce their values on others without engaging in a process of discussion and persuasion, without actually making the case for the values they hold? The Constitution has a process for this, namely new amendments can be ratified by the states and become part of the Constitutiom. We did that with slavery and many other issues.
So why don’t we do the same with gay marriage and with the right of gay people to have equal access to adopting? Is it because these same people don’t want to be bothered making their case? The US Supreme Court invalidated their ongoing process back a few years ago when it ruled, unconstitutionally (because no constitutional amendment exists to this effect), that states cannot define marriage in a way that excludes gay people marrying. This silenced the ongoing and vibrant debate among the states on the issue, where many states had already passed laws protecting a right for gay people to marry. These states did this because the arguments were being made, because public opinion was shifting.
Now I see gays really want to use the power of the State to push their values for them, rather than pushing those values themselves. Yet we also have a right to not be forced to act in a way that violates our own sincerely held beliefs and values.
Gay people should not be forced to place their adoptive children (assuming they have any, which biologically speaking isn’t likely) with parents who oppose homosexuality, and neither should people who oppose homosexuality be forced to place their adoptive children with gay families.
Likewise, a gay baker should not be forced to bake a cake for people who oppose homosexuality, and neither should a baker who opposes homosexuality be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding. We must enshrine the right to uphold and act according to our sincerely held beliefs and values, because without that we have nothing.
The other side of the issue, to which I am also partial, is that the economy requires equal playing fields and that if you engage in economic transactions you shouldn’t have the right to pick and choose with whom you transact based on features like the sexuality of the person who wants to transact with you. Such features are in theory superficial to and irrelevant to the economic transaction itself. To an extent I agree with this analysis. I’m not a hardcore libertarian who wants to return to the days of white and black bathrooms. Yet my personal distaste over that issue doesn’t overdetermine my capacity to see there are deeper issues here.
At the end of the day the fundamental legal position must be that each person have a right to choose with whom to freely transact, that choice based on that person’s own values. If two people cannot agree on those values and one party wishes not to transact then that must be legally upheld as a basic human right. Again we are talking about free transactions. With whom you associate. The freedom to associate also means the freedom to not associate.
I should have the right to refuse to transact with a Nazi who walks into my bakery and wants me to make a pro-Hitler cake. Likewise a Christian baker should have the right to refuse to transact with a gay couple who wants a gay wedding cake baked. And logically we must also extend that to a right to refuse to transact with people based also on their race, as ugly as that is.
The bottom line is that we must always fight for our values. You have to convince others if you want them to choose to freely transact with you. To undermine this principle is to negate the capacity for and need to make value determinations. And without that capacity we can barely even be called human.