Live from Music Row, Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Misrule of Law blogger and retired attorney Mark Pulliam to the newsmaker line to discuss his recent article which addresses the favoritism of LGBTQ rights over Christians and conservatives.
Leahy: We welcome to our newspaper line right now our very good friend Mark Pulliam. Mark is a retired attorney who came to Tennessee, to Blount County via Texas and California, and now blogs at Misrule of Law and writes really great articles. And there’s this article, Mark; I want to chat with you about, headline: How LGBTQ Antidiscrimination Laws Threaten Our Liberty. You are so politically incorrect, Mark.
Pulliam: I try to be.
Leahy: (Laughs) You start out the article, and it’s a very good observation. You go into most businesses, and you’ll see a sign, and the sign says, we reserve the right to refuse service to you. I’ve seen that sign my whole life. And you sort of get the idea that these owners have rights. Is that changing, Mark, and is that good or bad?
Pulliam: Yes, to answer your question, Michael. Yes. Things are changing, and the freedom of association that we have taken for granted for so long is changing, but it’s changing in a very selective way. And a couple of things happened last week in juxtaposition that illustrates this. One was a case argued in the U.S. Supreme Court about a web designer in Colorado who objected to putting together wedding websites, which are now a thing for people getting married, and she didn’t want to do wedding websites for same-sex marriages.
And this is a big controversy, just like a similar case a few years ago involving the cake baker from Colorado, Jack Phillips, which involved a cake baker who didn’t want to put together wedding cakes for same-sex weddings.
And this is going to be a very controversial decision because sexual orientation is protected by state civil rights laws in Colorado. And the LGBTQ crowd claims that it discriminates against them if wedding photographers and cake bakers, and web designers refused to do services for them because of religious objections to same-sex marriage.
At the same time, there were news reports out of Richmond, Virginia, that a trendy restaurant had, at the last minute, canceled a reservation for a group that had booked a room to have an event because the gay servers at the restaurant found out that the group was pro-life and opposed to same-sex marriage.
And the owner of the restaurant bragged that, yes, I did this to protect my staff because they shouldn’t do anything that makes them feel uncomfortable. So here you have the irony that the LGBTQ crowd wants to have the right to discriminate against Christians and conservatives because it would make them uncomfortable to do so.
At the same time, they want to force Christians to provide services to them, even though it violates their religious beliefs and amounts to coerced speech. And remember, a few years ago, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, while she was serving as President Trump’s press secretary, was kicked out of a restaurant in Virginia in the middle of their meal because the wait staff decided, we don’t like you.
We don’t like your views. So either we’re going to have freedom of association or we’re not. But having selective enforcement of freedom of association amounts to a caste system in which LGBTQ rank higher than conservatives and Christians, which is antithetical to equality under the law.
Leahy: Rules for thee, but not for me.
Pulliam: Exactly.
Leahy: Isn’t all this like this? Jack Phillips the baker series of cases seems to be ongoing. They just seem to be going there’s always some kind of litigation that somebody’s suing him. The guy is just a baker.
He’s just trying to be a baker and bake for folks that he wants to bake for and do cakes that he wants to do. It seems common sense to me. Hasn’t this guy been targeted by the LGBTQ community? And aren’t they very aggressively using lawfare to diminish the rights of anybody that they don’t like?
Pulliam: That’s exactly what’s going on. And in 2017, the day that the Supreme Court issued a decision which was on very narrow grounds, that overturned a particular decision that had been rendered in Colorado against Jack Phillips, that same day, a transitioned person went into his cake shop and ordered a cake to celebrate her gender transition, which was obviously a setup and designed to provoke round two of the litigation.
Now, Colorado has millions of people. There are many places that bake cakes. There are many places that provide websites for weddings. And if people just wanted to respect the pluralism in our society, they could find a vendor who was congenial to their point of view. But that’s not what they’re trying to do.
What they’re trying to do is to force Christians and conservatives to submit, to get on their knee and genuflect to same-sex marriage, which is, frankly, to many people, a made-up right that the Supreme Court pulled out of thin air in 2015.
And even the author Obergefell, of the same-sex marriage decision, said that many, many people have sincere, legitimate religious objections to same-sex marriage. So why, if people have sincere, legitimate, long-standing objections based on Judeo-Christian values to same-sex marriage, should we allow a small minority to force the majority to submit to that? It’s contrary to everything that our Constitution and values represent.
Leahy: This destruction of individual liberty and the right to do kind of what you want as long as you don’t hurt somebody else. Been the bedrock of Americanism since our founding, and yet the destruction of that right has accelerated at a lightning pace over the past five or six years.
Is there anywhere in the United States where you think people can just do what they want to within traditional American liberties or is everybody getting crushed by the lawfare of the left?
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Mark Pulliam” by Mark Pulliam.
