"One Nation Over God"

                Recently, I was listening to a Michael W. Smith song, Breakdown, and was struck by a line he used, “One nation over God, is that what we’ve now become?”  Morality is now defined by the consensus of society, and those in the minority are scorned, belittled, criminalized and denied the freedoms our founding fathers fought so laboriously to ensure.  Morality is no longer viewed as a fixed standard established by an immutable God, but a sliding scale determined by focus groups, polls, and social media.

                A short time ago the Kansas legislature was presented with a bill, not yet voted on, by Charles Macheers that would have exempted any private business or public employee from providing, “…any services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods or privileges…” related to any “…marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement…” if those actions would conflict with that person’s “sincerely held religious beliefs.”  Another proposed Arizona law, vetoed by the governor, was similar, though perhaps more expansive.  The point of both efforts was to protect the First Amendment right to freely exercise religious beliefs.  Both were specifically, though unmentioned in either bill, written in reaction to the growing number of states legalizing homosexual marriages.

                My limited understanding of both pieces of legislation leads me to conclude that the authors’ intents were honorable, but the practical applications would have been onorous.  The freedoms delineated in the First Amendment were not intended to be unlimited.  The framers of the Constitution knew there must be limitations on speech.  We all know we can’t maliciously shout, “Fire!” in a crowded theater.  The press are not free to print libel.  And though it may be a sincerely held tenet of one’s religion, people can’t be sacrificed on any religious altar.  All of our rights must be balanced on the scale of fairness to others.  The pieces of legislation referred to above, while submitted with good intentions, appear to unfairly limit the freedom of others for the sake of “religious liberty.”

                However, after reading an op-ed in the Sunday, February 23, 2014 edition of the Sacramento Bee, I had some concerns that the authors of these bills must have had as well.  The article was written by Leonard Pitts, Jr., a writer for the Miami Herald.  He likened the Kansas bill to the Jim Crow laws that allowed wide-spread discrimination against Blacks in this country.  If passed, both the Kansas and Arizona bills had potential to substantially discriminate against homosexuals, allowing people with “sincerely held religious beliefs” to refuse them everything from haircuts to hotel accommodations.  I agree with him that we should not allow such generalized discrimination.  However, I wrote to him and asked if he thought a Jewish baker should be forced to decorate and deliver a cake for the installation ceremony of some Imperial Kludd?  Should a Muslim caterer be forced to provide alcohol and pork for a National Hog Farmers convention?  Two of the most reported examples of religious freedom versus discrimination against homosexuals involved Christian bakery owners in Colorado and Arizona.  They didn’t want to supply wedding cakes for same sex weddings because it violated their sincerely held religious beliefs.  Mr. Pitts, Jr. never answered my questions.  I have to contemplate that if there are limits to the First Amendment rights to protect the minority, shouldn’t there be limits to the Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection to protect those whose freedoms under the First Amendment are at risk?

                But it was something else in Mr. Pitts, Jr.’s article that jolted me (beside the fact that he placed quotation marks around the word “Christian”).  He likened the introduction of the Kansas legislation to “locking the garage door after the car has been stolen, the fence fixed after the cows have wandered off.  Consider:  The bulk of the country now supports gay rights.  Most young conservatives now support gay rights.  The federal courts now support gay rights.”  In other words, morality is determined by a consensus of the people living in a country, the majority of a particular sub-group of a political grouping, and the actions of a government body.  And, as he implies later, moral standards change over time and we must all do our best to keep up.  There is, apparently, no objective, immutable standard of morality.

                We are now, as Michael W. Smith puts it, “One nation over God.”  He no longer is recognized as the determiner of moral standards of behavior.  His book no longer holds the unchangeable truth that only he can delineate.  Acceptable or unacceptable behavior are no longer his to judge.  He is no longer the giver of “certain inalienable rights” as our founding documents indicate.  He has been replaced by the ego-centric individual, or by a collection of such individuals.  Without an objective standard of right and wrong, everyone is free to decide how to define morality.  And if enough people generally agree with each other, they have the right to force their morality on everyone else, even people outside their society.  Mr. Pitts, Jr. believes he has the right to condemn Russia and Uganda because those countries have policies that differ from his standard of morality.

                It’s a slippery slope we are descending.  The last time everyone did what was right in their own eyes, the great flood stopped them all.