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Apple's Tim Cook Calls Out "Religious Freedom" Laws As Discriminatory
An anonymous reader writes It will come as no surprise that Apple's CEO Tim Cook doesn't agree with so-called religious freedom laws. Cook says, "[they] rationalize injustice by pretending to defend something many of us hold dear," and has penned an op-ed piece for The Washington Post which reads in part: "A wave of legislation, introduced in more than two dozen states, would allow people to discriminate against their neighbors. Some, such as the bill enacted in Indiana last week that drew a national outcry and one passed in Arkansas, say individuals can cite their personal religious beliefs to refuse service to a customer or resist a state nondiscrimination law. Others are more transparent in their effort to discriminate. Legislation being considered in Texas would strip the salaries and pensions of clerks who issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples — even if the Supreme Court strikes down Texas' marriage ban later this year. In total, there are nearly 100 bills designed to enshrine discrimination in state law. These bills rationalize injustice by pretending to defend something many of us hold dear. They go against the very principles our nation was founded on, and they have the potential to undo decades of progress toward greater equality."
Everyone discriminates. You choose physical / personality traits that you require in someone to date / marry / have sex with. You choose your hobbies, bands, etc. You say "I love McDonald's" or "I hate White Castle". EVERYONE DISCRIMINATES.
Business owners are supposed to (and used to) have the right to refuse service to anyone that they didn't want to work with. Then with the Civil Rights movement, they decided that for blacks to have equal rights, business owners had to lose their rights (yeah, I don't get the logic either). This issue came up recently with the cases of both a photographer and a baker being forced, under threat of fine and jail, to work for gay couples getting married when the business owners were against gay marriage for religious reasons. This law was written because of the fact that other governments in the country have been forcing people to work for others against their will. If people didn't have to be afraid of being forced to do something they find immoral, then there wouldn't have been demand for a law to protect them from it.
Instead of just allowing businesses to operate how they want and customers deciding who succeeds and who doesn't (can you imagine how fast Walmart or McDonald's would go out of business if they put up "No blacks allowed" signs?), people want to decide that by opening a business, you lose any right to decide how you live your life and who you associate with. It's idiotic, to say the least. The only reason that people currently are opposed to the "religious freedom" law is because they don't like THAT religious view. However, when this law is used to allow a black business owner to tell KKK members to go to hell and he won't serve them, maybe you'll realize that it's a two-way street.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Gay advocates talk about freedom. They call it the civil rights issue of our time, invoking the Constitution, equal rights, etc. No matter what they say, however, that's all just a legally palatable cover for their real motivation: Feeling normal.
They just want the gay jokes to disappear. They just want the unspoken snarls or looks of disgust when people see them to vanish. They just want people to pause to gather the PC thing to say in social situations when they find out someone is gay. They'd probably even remove the word gay from the human lexicon altogether if they could. "We're not any different than you."
The only way that can happen is to completely tamp out any social mores that say that being gay is wrong. "Wrong" has to be made "right". "Immorality" has to be made into "equal rights". That requires rewriting millenia of fundamental religious dogma - and a very heavy, persistent, and fascist jackboot to accomplish it.
Sincerely I cannot understand how this is modded informative. There is absolutely no factual data that supports what you just said. Sure, the bible implies what you described, but well, it's the bible, and the day we'll start to take the bible as "factual data" in Slashdot will be the day logic gets shattered to pieces.