Think it through
About 25 years before the July 4th revolution was enunciated by a group of rich, white slave owners, a group of Philadelphia Quakers came together to refuse to transcribe wills for clients bequeathing human beings as property. They took that moral high ground not because of their Christian faith but in spite of it.
After all, the Bible was fertile ground for the defence, not the condemnation, of slavery. There was no Eleventh Commandment thundering Thou Shalt Not Enslave Thy Fellow Human. Quite the contrary, St Paul encouraged the Ephesian slaves to obey their “earthly masters with respect and fear.”
Yet it was, they claimed, their Christian faith that compelled those Philadelphia Quakers to take a moral decision to discriminate against their prospective clients contrary to entrenched civil law. They declared they had the right to refuse service to people they found morally repugnant. They were correct in doing so, and we should applaud their enlightened courage.
So what have I gone and done here, anyway? Have I found a counter-example to justify Lorie Smith’s refusal to design hypothetical websites for hypothetical gay weddings? Have I just gone and created a sneaky little argument in support of the hateful MAGA crowd and their phoney SCOTUS case? In the final analysis, haven’t I just demonstrated that we all have the right to refuse service to anyone we find morally reprehensible on religious grounds?
No I have not, and the reason strikes to the heart of what we mean when we talk about truth. I am about to use some outmoded words here, brothers and sisters, such as truth, such as righteousness, such as good and evil. Because those are real things that exist in independent reality. They are not relativistic nonsense fabricated by human imagination for an indifferent universe. Those ideals matter because they really exist and we all know the difference between them. We know the difference between right and wrong without having to be told by anyone, not by a government, not by a religion.
The reason those two instances of civil disobedience are not the same thing is because one has victims and the other does not. Slavery victimises us all. It diminishes the slave and the slaveholder alike because it is an evil and cruel and barbaric outrage against the foundation of rational humanity. Being gay, on the other hand, hurts no one. It creates no victims. It is an alternative form of love that ought to be accepted by everyone and is ultimately nobody’s business when it’s not.
We are repulsed by slavery because it’s morally wicked and despicable. How do we know this? Because we would not be slaves ourselves. Similarly, we love whom we love, and as long as our love does no harm to anyone else it is good and deserves to be respected. There is no moral ambiguity here. It’s the truth.
We might even go so far as to say we hold these truths to be self-evident. They are woven into the fabric that makes us human. They are part of who we are and we don’t need to be told to believe it because it’s obvious in the first place. It’s part of our instinct. Only when that instinct is perverted, by religion, by hateful ideology, by bigotry and intolerance does it get corrupted and become something contrary to that which we know instinctively to be true.
We have the truth on our side, and even our enemies suspect this. That is why they run when they see us coming loaded down with facts. That is why they prefer to do their deeds in darkness and in secret. That is why they invent out of whole cloth cases and witnesses and evidence they dare not bring into a court of law for fear of committing perjury.
For all their faults, there isn’t a single member of that original Continental Congress that signed the Declaration of Independence that would countenance the philosophical nonsense that comprises a MAGA Republican today. They understood the difference between an inalienable right and the corrupted fruit of hate and oppression. It takes years of indoctrinating corruption to make a MAGA Republican, it only takes a moment of thought to see the incorruptible, fundamental truth. So have a happy Fourth of July, and, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.