Not Tired of Winning Yet XLIV
I could not stop loud peals of triumphant laughter at this one:
US President Donald Trump on Friday invited National Football League players who protest social injustice by kneeling during the national anthem — a gesture he has criticized — to suggest prisoners for potential pardons.
“I’m going to ask them to recommend to me people that were unfairly treated — friends of theirs or people that they know about — and I’m going to take a look at those applications,” Trump told reporters before heading to Canada for the G7 summit.
“And if I find, and my committee finds that they are unfairly treated, then we will pardon them or at least let them out.”
In one fell swoop, President Trump deflates the entire racist anti-American narrative of the Left.
If there is a real injustice in our court system, it can be corrected. If the players insulting the anthem and the flag have a real grievance, let them name names. If they cannot name names, it is exposed for all the world to see as not a real grievance.
As a public relations coup, it is brilliant. The Fake News will have a hard time spinning, warping, and lying about this to force it into their simplistic black-and-white angels-and-imps narrative to which they are wedded.
On an unrelated note: I was not planning on writing an entry in this series lauding the recent Supreme Court victory of a Christian bakerman being harassed by antichristians in the name of sexual abnormality.
The holding was narrow, and did not address the fundamental issue involved. This is, of course, in keeping with the tradition of judicial review, for justices should let decisions stand when they may, and should decide on the particular case before them.
But this case was decided on the unrelated ground that the Colorado Antichristian Committee for Thought Crimes (or whatever it is called) offered public statements showing bias. In effect, this ruling means that Thought Crime regulators in the bureaucracy should hide their motives.
Concurring opinion framed the issue as a First Amendment freedom of speech issue. This is a mistake on the part of the justices, and turns on the rather frivolous grounds that baking a cake is an artistic expression. This would allow Christian dressmakers not to provide original dresses to atheists seeking to mock our sacraments, but not, for example, Christian churches renting out a hall for a reception.
The issue is a Free Exercise Clause: Christians are forbidden by God from participating in public ceremonies that encourage or condone sin, and to supply goods and services to a ceremony that mocks and desecrates the holy sacrament of matrimony is participation.
Forcing us, in the name of the law, to bow to a secular atheist commandment to celebrate sexual abomination, to force Christian to chose between obedience to human law or obedience to God, is a clear violation of the Free Exercise Clause: those First Amendment rights are not waived merely by offering goods and services to the general public.
No Christian baker in America refuses to sell a gay man a birthday cake. That might arguably be the type of discrimination the federal law seeks to deter. But baking a wedding cake participates and the wedding, as does sewing a wedding dress or renting a reception hall.
The ruling in this case was not a defeat, to be sure. But it was no victory. But the legal precedent that Christians are second class citizens, who can be compelled to participate in ceremonies that desecrate our sacraments, is left intact.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
