The Point: Sticks and Stones . . . and Discrimination

We’ve seen what happens to business owners who refuse an LGBT person some good or service because of the proprietor’s religious convictions: first, life-destroying cruelty, followed by potentially-ruinous litigation. But what happens when the shoe is on the other foot? Not much. Dr. Everett Piper of Oklahoma Wesleyan University recently sought to purchase “a museum quality display case for a scroll of the Torah” that the school had recently acquired. The response from the vendor was unequivocal: they found Piper’s “publicly expressed views” on LGBT issues to be “hateful, hurtful and abhorrent” and declined to do business with the university. That prompted Piper to make the obvious comparison to what happened to Jack Phillips in Colorado. But that’s where the similarity ended. While he and the university had been discriminated against, he didn’t sue. Instead, as he wrote in the Washington Times, he remembered “what [his] mother said about ‘sticks and stones’” and decided to buy his furniture from someone who “isn’t a religious bigot.” It’s a sort of the modern version of turning the other cheek.  

02/6/19