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Monday, September 25, 2017

Protesting the national anthem


CHRISTIANS : I'm so mad the government is forcing those people to bake a cake against their beliefs!
SAME CHRISTIANS: I'm so glad that Trump is demanding those athletes be fired for their beliefs!
Come quickly Lord Jesus.

Without my wading into all the twists and turns of this particular kerfuffle, Pittman's comparison is simple-minded:

i) There's a fundamental difference between the state passing laws which discriminate against citizens who dissent from the LGBT agenda, and a public official expressing his opinion that a private business should fire political dissidents. In the former case, you have a direct exercise of government power to suppress political dissidents. 

ii) We shouldn't necessarily take the same side on every issue based on abstract consistency with some generic principle without regard to the moral or factual differences between one social issue and another. If this is representative of how Pittman evaluates issues, he needs to learn how to keep more than one idea in his head at a time. As I often say, we should treat like things alike and unlike things unalike. We need to take all the relevant variables into consideration. Ironically, Pittman is resorting to the same simplistic logic as the "marriage equality" lobby.  The comparison is more complex than Pittman's fallacious analogy. Does protesting the national anthem based on the BLM narrative have the same merit as Christians refusing to cater LGBT celebrations? 

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