The Gaystapo and the difference between Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler

During an undergraduate Political Science class a few decades ago one of my professors discussed the difference between Stalin and Hitler. While both were indeed power hungry and responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, they were distinctly different in motivation.

Stalin, he suggested, was completely focused on power. He didn’t care how he got it or who he had to work with or betray in order to get it or keep it. If you were in his way, he would crush you and not think twice about it. If however you got out of his way and ceased to be a threat, he likely would not care.

Hitler, my professor opined, was another animal all together. While he too was focused on power, power was not his animating influence. The superiority of the Aryan race was. Like Stalin, he would work with those he didn’t respect, and he too would crush anyone who was in his way both enemies and erstwhile friends. But with Hitler there was something more. He wanted to eliminate or exterminate the “Untermensch” or those deemed subhuman. This group included Jews, gypsies and slavs among others. Some could be “Germanized” such as the slavs, while others, like the Jews, had to be exterminated. And in the case of the Jews, had Hitler been given the chance it’s likely he would have sought to exterminate them from every corner of the earth.

And that, according to my professor, was the difference between the two. Stalin wanted power for power’s sake, and so long as someone wasn’t a threat to him, he largely didn’t care. Hitler on the other hand wanted power because he felt it rightfully belonged to him and his race and because those he considered defective sullied the human race, and had to be eliminated, wherever they were. He was a fanatic to the cause.

All of this came back to me when I read a piece on RedState.com titled “Gaystapo Takes No Prisoners: GoFundMe Torpedoes Sweet Cakes” about the torpedoing of a GoFundMe account set up to support an Oregon couple persecuted by the state for not baking cakes for a gay wedding. Gaystapo is a term I’d never heard, but it immediately seemed to fit. Like Hitler’s Gestapo, the secret police who were above the law and responsible for eliminating threats to the Reich, the Gaystapo seems to believe their role is to eliminate what they consider threats to the gay agenda, wherever they may be.

Just as my professor suggested that Hitler would have sent his troops to the far corners of the earth to eliminate the Untermensch Jews, apparently the Gaystapo seek to eliminate the religious freedoms of any who disagree with them. Whether it’s bakers or photographers or pizza makers or chapels, those whose religious convictions compel them to decline to participate in gay marriage activities must be driven from the public square – even if the issue is purely hypothetical. They should be sued or harassed or prosecuted into oblivion, First Amendment be damned.

And we’re not even talking about people who refuse to serve gay customers, which most of the offending proprietors happily do, but rather, we are talking about people who simply decline to participate in gay marriage activities. Indeed, in some of these cases the targeted establishments had served the aggrieved customers for years and when declining to service the wedding even suggested other businesses that would be willing to participate. Nor is any actual damage required for someone to use government to score a windfall. The tyranny of the Gaystapo is not so different than that of the ADA enabled shakedown artists who earn tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars by searching out targets to drag into court, or simply threaten to do so. Those who believe their faith compels them to decline to participate must bend their faith to the gay agenda or fear state sanctioned prosecution.

One has to wonder where the Gaystapo stops. Once they have forced all businesses to comply with their agenda, do they then get to press charges against a formerly resistant photographer if the photos he’s forced to take come back a bit blurry or off color? What about entrepreneurs who lose their businesses, should they be allowed to get a job at another business even if their views don’t change? What about Christians and Muslims and anyone whose religion holds that homosexuality is a sin, will they have to be sent to reeducation camps? When the transition of marriage logically leads to the union of three or four or five people will hoteliers be prosecuted for not featuring ten foot wide beds?

It’s interesting, in a painful sort of way, that in a nation where the Constitution says nothing explicit about civil rights, somehow the civil rights inferred from its words (or in state constitutions) are now being used to trample on religious rights explicitly protected in its most important amendment.  Of course Hitler came to power legally under the German Constitution and then eviscerated it as he rallied an entire nation to his malevolent cause.  Let's hope the Gaystapo is not as effective as his Gestapo.

Gay Wedding Cakes, Religious Freedom and the Return of Slavery in America

The most common definition of a slave is: A person who is the property of and wholly subject to another. There is another definition however: A person entirely under the domination of some influence or person. Slavery has been outlawed in the US for 150 years, but some people want to bring it back… but not necessarily in the form you might think. Uncle Sam of course is not a master and citizens are not his slaves. The government – at least not the government defined in the Constitution – doesn’t have the right to tell Americans who they have to work for or who their businesses have to serve.

It can however, at least according to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, demand that businesses that offer to provide services to the public not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. That means however that if you are offering to sell cakes, you must not decide that you will sell cakes to men and not women, to Jews but not Christians, to blacks but not whites, or to a native born American but not a naturalized citizen born in Canada.

Interestingly, other than religion all of the limitations are innate, things that people are born with or had from birth. That prohibition also applies to the later characteristics defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act. The CRA says what a business can’t do, it can’t discriminate based on a clear set of criteria… but it says nothing about what they must do. A black chef can’t legally refuse to provide service to someone who walks in simply because he’s white. He can however choose not to provide service to him when the man tells him that the event is a celebration of KKK history. That’s discrimination, but it’s legal discrimination and its well within the chef’s rights.

The CRA lists specific criteria upon which a business is not allowed to discriminate: race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. But that’s it. Other than those reasons any business can choose who they would like to serve. A 7-11 store is well within its rights to say “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service”. By the same token a gun store can choose not to sell a gun to a drunk person and business can choose not to hire people with tattoos. A community can limit its inhabitants to those over 55 or a storekeeper with a Napoleon complex can choose to never serve customers over 6 ft. These restrictions may or may not be prudent, but none of them are illegal as businesses have the right to choose to whom they provide services within the framework of the CRA, the ADA and the Equal Protection Clause upon which both are based.

Which brings us to the issue of bakers and photographers and others. The question is, working under the shadow of the Equal Protection Clause, do such businesses have the right to refuse to provide services for a gay wedding, something their faith tells them is a sin? Absolutely. Do they have the right to refuse to provide services for a gay wedding? Absolutely. Should they be protected from lawsuits for doing so? Of course.

The point is, in almost every one of these cases the service providers did not refuse service because someone was gay. Rather, they declined to participate in an activity their faith tells them is sinful. Indeed the baker in the case actually offered to let the gay couple purchase any one of the cakes in his shop. He was simply refusing to bake a gay themed wedding cake.

The distinction between the activity and a customer’s gayness or lack thereof may be a fine one, but it is an important one. The CRA says businesses cannot discriminate against customers based on various innate or unchangeable characteristics. Significantly, the characteristic of being gay is not among them. Which means that theoretically businesses have the right to discriminate against gays or 22 year olds or journalists with no threat of government sanction. Nonetheless, most Americans oppose discriminating against people for their sexual orientation and the businesses in question were not doing so. (Similarly, 85% of Americans believe service providers should be allowed to decline to participate in gay weddings.)  They were simply declining to participate in an activity that their faith says is sinful.

The jilted couples in these cases looked to the government to force the said businesses to provide the services they wanted. In all three cases the government obliged stating that the religious objections of the business owners were trumped by the couple’s equal protections. That is both unfortunate and absurd. If the government can force a Christian baker to bake a cake for a gay couple, can it force a Muslim grocer who does special orders to special order pork? Can it compel the aforementioned black chef to cater the KKK’s event? Can it force a vegan landlord to rent his building to someone wanting to open a steakhouse? The answer of course is no, no and no and the reason is because Americans are not slaves and the government has no right to compel them to do things that go against their moral convictions.

That is likely news to people in government (and their liberal enablers) who believe they are the masters of the American people. They are not. Americans are free and by constitution they have given government limited powers – even if the government is increasingly obliterating those limits. Of those freedoms,  religious freedom is among the most important.  It is what brought the Pilgrims to America 400 years ago and it’s been a hallmark of American society ever since. A government commanding its citizens to do things beyond its scope is never a good idea, which Obamacare demonstrates on a daily basis. A government commanding its citizens to do something that goes against their religious faith is even worse because it undermines the fundamental legitimacy of the government itself. If these rulings stand, if the most basic freedom to abstain from participating in activities your religion tells you are sinful is now largely gone, then the progressive barbarians are no longer at the gate… they’ve entered your home, taken control of your life and have carte blanche to force you to do whatever it is they demand – or face ruinous consequences otherwise. Such is the kindling with which revolutionary fires are often started…