Apt comparisons

I largely agree with Roger Olson's post. (Yes, even broken clocks can be accidentally right.) 

Now, I’m NOT comparing gays with pornographers or white supremacists and if you think so you don’t understand the nature of comparisons. My comparisons are ONLY for the purpose of asking whether there are legitimate limits to legal requirements to do business with people. Almost everyone I know would say there are SOME such limits. 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2014/03/thoughts-about-the-gay-marriage-debate-and-christians-rights/

Olson is right that many people don't understand analogies. I myself have made that point:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2013/07/extreme-examples.html

Olson is not making a moral comparison. Rather, he's testing whether, as a matter of principle, opponents of religious liberty protections think vendors never have the right to refuse a customer. 

But with all those caveats duly noted, what's wrong with comparing homosexuals to pornographers or white supremacists? When Christians use these analogies, critics typically wax apoplectic. How dare you compare homosexuals to pornographers! 

At that point, many Christians become defensive and begin to back down. "Of course I wasn't saying homosexuals are morally analogous to pornographers! That wasn't the point of the comparison." 

But even if that wasn't the point of the comparison, from the standpoint of biblical ethics, we should challenge the critic's outrage. Now, maybe just being homosexual isn't morally equivalent to being a pornographer. That's comparing what one person is with what another person does. So that's somewhat equivocal. 

But from the standpoint of biblical ethics, surely homosexual behavior is at least as bad as producing or consuming pornography–if not worse. 

And while we're on the subject of white supremacists, nowadays that's often something they never act on. It's just a belief or attitude. Yet it's still culpable.

We mustn't allow society to bully us into treating homosexuality as morally neutral, much less good, so that this is merely a value-free debate over the right of venders to choose their customers. We can't allow the liberal establishment to take the moral dimension of homosexuality off the table, as if that's out-of-bounds.