Reposted from my Blog - a response to today’s SCOTUS ruling in favor of the Colorado Baker who claimed his religion allowed him to discriminate against a gay customer:

OK so here’s the thing, what the Supreme Court ruled in this case was that the Colorado Baker was not justifying discrimination by using religion, but that in fact the religion itself was discriminatory and that nothing about that nullifies its protections under the law.

Allow me to don my (dusty) atheist hat for a minute. The simple fact is that the Bible offers every point of view on the menu and lets the reader choose what works best for them. If you want to justify slavery or rape or murder or homophobia, the Bible has something for you.

What my sane and moral Christian friends tend to cleave to is the actual reported words of Jesus Christ. Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. I’m assuming he never said anything about raping or keeping slaves either (feel free to point me to it if he did).

My thoughts where this is concerned is why wouldn’t he bring these things up? These were common evils of his time as they continue to be in our time and frankly the spoken word of God in the Old Testament does support these things so wouldn’t that fact demand a specific response if all of a sudden we’re going to change course? Jesus had 12 guys following him around noting everything he said....nothing about “and stop killing the gays!”?

On the one hand I have a huge sympathy for those who find solace in religion. Humans are pattern speaking animals and there are some enormous holes in our knowledge of the pattern of existence - although MUCH smaller than they were in the year of our Lord “Zero”. An atheist rejects filling those particular holes with dubious, unproven information. But, atheist are STILL pattern seekers and are just as prone to making this error elsewhere, particularly where the perspective is inherently skewed e.g. introspection.

Unfortunately, this nation was founded on “religious freedom” meaning any idea that enough people believe is legally “holy” and therefore must be accepted, including bigotry apparently.

I haven’t read the dissenting opinion in this case, but I can guess who might’ve written it and I would hope that the distinction they draw is one between how much as a society we value the civil right to discriminate over the civil right to live free of discrimination.

It’s long past due that abhorrent behavior such as discrimination and withholding medical treatments and the like be carved out of the protected space that religion occupies in our laws. It’s high time that a legal mandate be passed that says that no religion supersedes our agreed-upon legal morality.

We cannot have a country that puts God over law but BY DESIGN does not agree on what God is or says. Separation of church and state is a wonderful idea but it in fact is not enshrined in the constitution, and it’s high time that it was.

PG