Is Bruce Springsteen's Boycott of North Carolina the Same Thing as a Baker Refusing Service to Gay Couples?

No, but a lot of people seem to think so.

A petition on Change.org has garnered nearly 500 signatures in support of Bruce Springsteen’s decision to cancel an April 10 concert in Greensboro, NC. 

“Bruce Springsteen has a right to his deeply held beliefs. He has a right to control his business and refuse to do business with those he disagrees with,” the petition reads. 

Additionally, the petition author Dennis Burgard argues that like Springsteen, “every business person” is entitled to the right to deny services where and when it violates their beliefs.

Get it?

OK, so here's the difference between Bruce and that Christian baker, florist, whatever: 

If North Carolinians come to a Bruce concert in any other state, they won't be refused at the door while everybody else is let in. And in North Carolina, he's not refusing to play for any specific portion of the population  while playing others — he's withdrawing his services entirely within the state. The differences are clear, unless one wants to be ostentatiously ignorant of them.

Listen: I'm torn on the whole idea of whether Christian florists and bakers should be required to provide services. As a lapsed Mennonite — one who has a number of Christian conservative friends — I'm a big fan of conscientious objection, and that probably has to remain true even if I don't appreciate what's being conscientiously objected.* Then again, there's an argument that if you're going to provide services to the public, you provide your services to the public, end of story. My preference? Would be for everybody to avoid a confrontation on the issue. But I don't get that preference, and I do think there are competing claims to be weighed.

*Theologically, were I still a practicing Christian, I'd probably heed these verses:

27"But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.

...but I think the actual Gospel tends to involve a lot more turning the other cheek than actual Christians do.

That said, the implicit comparison between Bruce and the baker here is silly. If a Christian baker wants the same freedom Bruce has, they too can stop providing services altogether in an entire state whose policies they they find objectionable.

Is Bruce Springsteen "Illiberal" Not to Play a Concert in North Carolina?

Since we're in the season of flinging charges of "illiberalism" around, let's take a look at the latest — a screed against the so-called "LGBT Mafia" by Daniel Payne in The Federalist:

Aided by media that are both incompetent and often transparently biased, along with a burgeoning corporate culture that has discovered the economic benefits of public moral preening, we have what Stella Morabito aptly terms the “LGBT mafia:” a profoundly illiberal social movement rather single-mindedly determined to stamp out even minor and inconsequential dissent from its orthodoxy. It’s not going anywhere. In fact, it’s getting worse. 

(Snip, regarding passage of "religious liberty" bill in North Carolina): 

In response to this incredibly reasonable and commonsense bill, Bruce Springsteen cancelled a concert in Greensboro; dozens of corporations signed a protest letter; PayPal withdrew plans for an operations center in Charlotte; the composer Stephen Schwartz vowed that his productions—among them the Broadway hit “Wicked”—will not run in North Carolina; A&E and Lionsgate declared they will not film any productions in the state; and the federal government is deciding whether it can withhold billions and billions of dollars in highway, housing, and education funds.

A few months ago, we were saying it was "illiberal" of social movements to try to strongarm the public out of public places, as happened at Mizzou. Sounds right. More recently, we're labeling protests against Donald Trump to be "illiberal" — and that sounds slightly less right, but to the extent they were trying to drown him out, sure.

But now: Now the act of not holding a concert or signing a letter or deciding not to hold a play — that's an illiberal quashing of dissent. Well, no. That just seems like dissent to me. Covered by the First Amendment. And they're using the First Amendment the way it's commonly understood that we should: To try to peacefully create change.

There's nothing authoritarian about that, is there?

Christine Flowers distorts the record in Illinois

I actually agree with Daily News columnist Christine Flowers that churches, synagogues, mosques, etc., should have the right to choose their own ministers without government interference. But I think she distorts the facts of one case she references:

Things do get murky when money is involved. As Catholic Charities of Illinois found out, the state can put you out of the adoption business if it thinks that you're discriminating with public funds.

Just to be absolutely accurate: The state didn't put Catholic Charities out of the adoption business. Catholic Charities put itself out of the adoption business in Illinois rather than comply with state rules and help gay couples adopt kids. Flowers' description is legally defensible, I suppose—she is a lawyer, after all—but her characterization really misses the point of what happened.

Gay rights, Catholic rights, and adoption

Big battle brewing in Illinois:

Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money. The charities have served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state’s social service network for poor and neglected children.

Catholic bishops say they're fighting for their religious rights. “It’s true that the church doesn’t have a First Amendment right to have a government contract,” said one official, “but it does have a First Amendment right not to be excluded from a contract based on its religious beliefs.”

And if it were just about beliefs, I'd agree. But this is about practices. And the Catholic Church doesn't believe it can offer services in accordance with the rules and practices of the state that it ostensibly serves in providing adoption services. So Iowa is left with two choices: Adapt state policy to serve the Catholic Church's beliefs. Or let the Catholic Church withdraw and preserve its conscience.

That's a legitimate choice for the Catholic Church: It shouldn't do anything it considers evil. But I do find it sad that the church apparently believes that the lesser evil is to let a young child be without loving parents if those parents are gay. In the long run, maybe it's better that the church withdraw from this arena.

National Review's disingenuous editorial on gay rights

National Review's editors aren't happy with the Obama Administration's new efforts to protect gay rights abroad:

Support for human rights has a place in foreign policy, albeit a subordinate one. Among those rights, certainly, is the right of homosexuals to be free from violent attacks and other draconian punishments. As Clinton rightly notes, if there are fundamental rights at all (and the foundational premise of this republic is that there are) then they “are not conferred by the government,” but ours “because we are human.” The secretary then goes on to claim that human rights and gay rights are “one and the same,” which we suppose is true insofar as the latter collapses into the former. What we don’t understand is how Clinton’s view — that being human vests us with certain rights — entails or even is compatible with a second set of rights that one enjoys by virtue of being homosexual. When Clinton says, “It is a violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation,” no recourse is required to a gay right. The words “because of their sexual orientation” are superfluous. When she says that the horrors of “corrective” rape against women who are suspected of being homosexual are violations of a right, to what right could she be referring besides the right not to be raped, simpliciter?

Which makes a certain amount of sense on its own. It doesn't make sense in light of National Review's longtime efforts to call attention to Christian persecution abroad. Here's a typical example from earlier this year:

The Arab Spring has not been kind to Egypt’s Christian minority. Over the weekend, Muslims apparently incited by Islamist hardliners again terrorized Coptic Christians, in what is now a pattern of attacks against them and their churches. Possibly the Islamists are jockeying for political power in this transitional period, or even trying to immediately effect a religious cleansing similar to the one that has happened in Iraq.

Coptic Christians in the Imbaba district of Cairo report that on Saturday night they were assaulted by Muslims who looted and burned St. Mina’s Church and the Church of the Virgin Mary and attempted to burn St. Mary and St. Abanob Church. The press has reported that, according to the Copts, twelve people were killed. According to the Egyptian interior ministry, which habitually downplays or ignores attacks against Christians, possibly six victims were Christian and six were Muslim. More than a hundred people were injured, as Copts fought back with sticks and stones.

By National Review's logic today, we shouldn't really care so much that Christians were the victims of those attacks in Egypt; isn't it bad enough and criminal enough that anybody was beaten or attacked? Who cares what the motivating factors were?

I don't excuse the religious persecution, by the way. I find it repugnant and contemptible, just as I find it repugnant that gays are targeted for beatings and rapes and murder. But National Review isn't really in a position to suggest, with a straight face, that we should focus on behaviors to the exclusion of motivations.

George Will wants freedom of association ... for conservatives

There's a lot to unpack in George Will's column today about Vanderbilt University's decision to withhold recognition from the Christian Legal Society, a campus group that (naturally, given its orientation) wants to ensure that only Christians can be in its leadership.

I think Will goes wrong by starting to compare apples to oranges. Will must be quoted at length:

In 1995, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the private group that organized Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade to bar participation by a group of Irish American gays, lesbians and bisexuals eager to express pride in their sexual orientations. The court said the parade was an expressive event, so the First Amendment protected it from being compelled by state anti-discrimination law to transmit an ideological message its organizers did not wish to express.

In 2000, the court overturned the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling that the state law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation required the Boy Scouts to accept a gay scoutmaster. The Scouts’ First Amendment right of “expressive association” trumped New Jersey’s law.

Unfortunately, in 2010 the court held, 5 to 4, that a public law school in California did not abridge First Amendment rights when it denied the privileges associated with official recognition to just one student group — the Christian Legal Society chapter, because it limited voting membership and leadership positions to Christians who disavow “sexual conduct outside of marriage between a man and a woman.”

It seems to me that these three cases, though, are entirely consistent. The first two uphold the rights of private organizations to choose their members and their message. The third doesn't change that! The Christian Legal Society still has a right to exist in the California case—it just doesn't have the right to use the college's funds and facilities if it's going to exclude some students from membership. As Justice Ginsburg said in writing for the majority on that case: "In requiring CLS—in com­mon with all other student organizations—to choose be­tween welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress
constitutional limitations. CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings’ policy."

If anything, Vanderbilt has a stronger defense of its policy to deny the CLS the use of its funds and facilities: Unlike Hastings, it's a private university! Surely it, like the parade organizers and the Boy Scounts, has the right to chose its own expressive associations as well! But Will smells the smoke of pernicious progressive plotting:

Although Vanderbilt is a private institution, its policy is congruent with “progressive” public policy, under which society shall be made to progress up from a multiplicity of viewpoints to a government-supervised harmony. Vanderbilt’s policy, formulated in the name of enlarging rights, is another skirmish in the progressives’ struggle to deny more and more social entities the right to deviate from government-promoted homogeneity of belief. Such compulsory conformity is, of course, enforced in the name of diversity.

Shorter Will: Freedom of association is important ... for conservatives. If a private entity wants to exclude gays, he will defend to the death its right to do so. If a private entity wants to exclude a club that excludes gays, though, it's the death of freedom. Such a one-way conception of liberty isn't really liberty at all, is it? The shape of Will's argument is—as Justice Ginsburg suggested—seeking a privileged position for social conservatives under the rubric of seeking parity. That's usually what conservative groups accuse gay rights activists of doing!

It's worth mentioning that Will's column appears the same week as news emerges about Shorter University, a Christian college in Georgia that is now requiring its employees to abstain from pre- and extra-marital sex, including homosexual sex. I don't agree with Shorter University's theology—but it is a private university which takes no state or federal money. So even though I won't be sending my son there, I will defend the college's right to choose its associations. George Will would too, I imagine. He just doesn't apply the same standards in the opposite direction. Which means he's less attached to the liberty he claims to espouse than he is to opposing gays and liberals.

DADT and the GOP's Faux Populism

Back in the spring, when Democrats -- after a decades-long odyssey -- were preparing to pass a comprehensive health insurance bill, Republicans expressed outrage their opponents would do something the public didn't want them to do: the polls, they said, showed a clear majority of Americans opposed the bill. A CNN poll in March showed that 59 percent of respondents didn't like it. Passing the bill in the face of such opposition, the GOP said, was profoundly undemocratic.

Fast-forward to yesterday, when the GOP blocked progress of a bill that would repeal "Don't Ask Don't Tell," the law that lets the armed forces boot gay members. What's funny about this? Well, polls show that around 57-58 percent of Americans favor the DADT repeal -- almost exactly the same percentage that opposed the health care bill. The same Republican Party members who stood for the perogatives of majority-according-to-polling ignored the polling when it conflicted with their stances.

Why? Easy enough to guess. Some Republican senators presumably do believe -- without merit, I think -- that letting gays serve openly will disrupt the armed forces. Others were pandering to their anti-gay base, or just signing on for party unity. Whatever. I'm sure there are some other principled reasons for opposing the bill, but the fact is this: the GOP is staunchly for what the majority of Americans want, unless it isn't.

Now that Proposition 8 has been struck down, will gay marriage become the law of the land?

That's the central question of my Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk this week. My take:

Whether the Supreme Court strikes down gay-marriage bans may depend entirely on the attitudes and disposition of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who tends to be the swing vote on controversial issues. Reading his 2003 opinion in Lawrence v. Texas -- the ruling that struck down laws making homosexual sex a crime -- it's difficult to see how state bans on gay marriage will survive.

It is true that Kennedy, in his 2003 ruling, was careful to state that decriminalizing such sexual practices did not require formal government recognition of gay relationships. But the logic of that ruling is compelling in the context of gay marriage.

The logic was this: To use the law to set apart homosexual conduct "demeans the lives of homosexual persons," and thus is at odds with the guarantees of liberty provided by the U.S. Constitution.

Kennedy was right then, and he would be right now to say the same thing about gay-marriage bans.

Such a ruling would invariably bring cries of "judicial activism" from the right, but it's entirely appropriate for the courts to get involved. Since at least the late 1960s, the right to marry has been considered a "fundamental right" under the U.S. Constitution --and nobody seriously contests that. Fundamental rights, it should be noted, cannot and should not be contravened by legislative action or statewide referendums. They simply exist.

Walker correctly realized this in his ruling. Gay couples, he wrote, "do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize (their) objective as 'the right to same-sex marriage' would suggest that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples across the state enjoy -- namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask California to recognize their relationships for what they are: marriages."

If the Supreme Court follows its own precedent, it will agree. And that will be a good thing.

Ben obviously has a different take on things, about which I can say little more than what I have. I do have to take issue, though, with one of his remarks:

Marshalling one-sided testimony from social scientists led Walker to conclude: "Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage," "parents' genders are irrelevant to children's developmental outcomes" and, incredibly, "the evidence shows same-sex marriage has and will have no adverse effects on society or the institution of marriage."

Here's where it must be noted that if the testimony in the case seems "one-sided," it's because the Proposition 8 proponents who argued the case at trial barely bothered to put on a case. They called just two witnesses, one of whom -- David Blankenhorn -- wasn't a researcher, exactly, but a pundit. (From Prop 8 on Trial: "He has never written a peer-reviewed article on the effects of same-sex marriage nor, by his own admission, studied any of the legal cases in which the United States Supreme Court has declared marriage a fundamental right.") I think it's fair to say that Ben is just about as qualified as Blankenhorn to make the pro-Prop 8 case -- and Ben, despite being widely read and a great writer, isn't qualified at all to testify as an expert witness.

Qualifiactions aside, though, he wasn't exactly a stellar witness for his side:

Under cross-examination by David Boies, an attorney for challengers of the ballot measure, Blankenhorn admitted he knew of no study that showed children reared by gay couples fared worse than those raised by heterosexual parents.

Blankenhorn also conceded that same-sex marriage would probably "improve the well-being of gay and lesbian households and their children."

Further down our column, Ben complains that Judge Walker "simply asserts" that voters based their decisions based on moral disapproval. But the pro-Prop 8 attorneys basically tried to assert their way to legal victory in this case. That's not the fault of Walker, nor is it the fault of gay marriage advocates. And it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the pro-Prop 8 lawyers barely put on a case defending the Constitutionality of a gay marriage ban because, well, they didn't have much of a case to make.

Proposition 8 and judicial activism

This excerpt from Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling strikes a proper balance, I think:

An initiative measure adopted by the voters deserves great respect. The considered views and opinions of even the most highly qualified scholars and experts seldom outweigh the determinations of the voters. When challenged, however, the voters' determinations must find at least some support in evidence. This is especially so when those determinations enact into law classifications of persons. Conjecture, speculation and fears are not enough. Still less will the moral disapprobation of a group or class of citizens suffice, no matter how large the majority that shares that view. The evidence demonstrated beyond serious recknong that Proposition 8 finds support only in such disapproval. As such, Proposition 8 is beyond the constitutional reach of the voters or their representatives.

Emphasis added.

More on marriage: Josh Rosenau

Science blogger -- and fellow former Lawrencian -- Josh Rosenau takes note of my marriage post, and adds his own two cents:

Let's talk about my grandmother. Her husband died in his fifties, before I was born. Quite some time later, well after menopause, she remarried, and the man she married was the only grandfather on that side of the family that I ever knew. Both had adult children from previous marriages, and some of their grandchildren attended the wedding. They knew they wouldn't have children of their own, but that didn't change their desire to marry. Again, if conservatives cannot understand why senior citizens choose to marry and stay married past menopause… well, I'm still glad I'm not marrying a conservative.

When people make this argument that marriage is about procreation, it insults the memory of my grandmother and grandfather, people who could not have legally married if this standard were applied consistently. It insults people who are infertile for any reason, including voluntary sterilization, congenital conditions, or side effects of other medical treatments. And it insults anyone who takes marriage seriously – as an institution focused on bringing together loving couples and recognizing the special ties that they've formed.

Marriage is about kids. And nothing else.

National Review blasts last week's federal court ruling knocking down part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. The editors offer up -- once again -- a familiar argument for traditional marriage that, while much-debated the last few years, always is very bracing to me.

The actual motive for having governments recognize the union of a man and a woman (and only such a union) as a marriage is to encourage, in a gentle and non-coercive way, the formation and maintenance of a stable environment in which children can naturally come to be. If heterosexual coupling did not regularly produce children there would be no reason for the institution of marriage to exist, let alone for governments to recognize it.

What a depressingly -- implausibly -- narrow view of marriage.

No doubt, children are a common byproduct of heterosexual marriage. That's certainly been the case in my marriage, and I'm glad of it. But the pairing instinct -- one that predated any government recognition of the "institution" of marriage -- far exceeds simple propigation of the species. People, as a general rule, want company. They want sex, they want economic partnerships, they want somebody to hang out with.

To reduce marriage to merely a mechanism of natural child-creation -- as National Review and other conservatives regularly do, because it's pretty much the one thing that heterosexual marriage offers that same-sex partnerships can't -- is, when you think about it, a surprisingly Darwinian argument coming from a movement that is largely theology-minded. It aggressively ignores that humans are social, spiritual creatures and that they express those characteristics, often but not exclusively, through marriage. The conservative case against same-sex marriage reduces the "institution" to simple biology. It's a point of view that reduces humanity to the level of beasts, with a bureaucracy.

George Washington and Abe Lincoln: Founding Gay Bashers?

Via Andrew Sullivan, a little bit of patriotic gay-bashing:

Yuma Mayor Al Krieger said he spoke from the heart in a Memorial Day speech at Desert Lawn Cemetery. Krieger said, "And I cannot believe that a bunch of limp-wristed, lacey-drawed people could do what those men have done in the past."

Over a week after those comments, Krieger said there's nothing he would change. "I'm reluctant to compare myself to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, but I did get some feedback, and I don't think I said anything different than what they would have said."

Well sure, who can forget the stirring climax to Lincoln's Second Inaugural?

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. Except for the queers.

Or the finale of Washington's Farewell Address?

Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. But at least I'm not a pansy. Wait. Did that sound gay?

Brings a tear to your eye.

Let Cam & Mitchell kiss on 'Modern Family!'

Turns out I'm not the only one to notice that "Modern Family's" gay couple isn't very affectionate. Now there's a Facebook group -- nearly 6,000 members strong -- devoted to letting the pair kiss. And the producers have responded:

"Cameron and Mitchell are a loving, grounded, committed, and demonstrably affectionate couple and have been from the beginning of the series. It happens that we have an episode in the works that addresses Mitchell's slight discomfort with public displays of affection. It will air in the fall and until then, as Phil Dunphy would say, everyone please chillax."

Hey: I love "Modern Family" -- along with "Community," the funniest show of the 2009-10 season -- but that "slight discomfort with public displays of affection" is ... narratively convenient. And I don't think it's going to fool anybody. Certainly, we see Cam & Mitchell in private moments together, yet they still don't kiss.

I don't need "Modern Family" to be a gay makeout show. But it's done the foundational work of presenting the gay family as just another strand of a broader American family. Their very "normalness" makes it all the more glaring that they're not given the same kissy-face privileges as the show's straight couples.