Y’all will not be surprised to learn, I am sure, that Albert the Pious is having a regular old godawful conniption fit about Governor Nathan Deal’s veto of the Georgia bill stigmatizing gays et. al., and the blowback against Tarheel medievalism.
As a matter of fact, the thrust behind this legislation was for the state government in Georgia to recognize rights that are guaranteed yes, by the First Amendment, and conferred by God. But there’s also the recognition that in the current climate, those religious liberties are under threat and thus must specifically be defended by law. That’s what the legislators in Georgia did; that’s what the Governor has now vetoed. The head-on confrontation between sexual liberty on the one hand and religious liberty on the other hand is one that is inevitable, and it’s one that the forces for religious liberty are losing over and over again. The big point for us today is this: If it will lose in Georgia, it can lose anywhere. And the fact that it lost in Georgia is no small fact …
— SIGH — Relax, Albert — you can still be a Southern Baptist. You may say excruciatingly stupid things about Biblical inerrancy, you may say grace in restaurants, you may abstain from alcohol, you may go around telling people that the cult is more important than their wedding vows and children, you may put on your special Sunday suit every Sunday, you may mark-up your Bible with notes and yellow-stickies, and you may keep the others out of your church and home.
For-profit commercial enterprises that operate in public spaces at public sufferance may not act to exclude those people you so intensely dislike from participation in the public/economic life of the community, however. That is all; basically, businesses must treat everybody with ordinary decency. You don’t have to. Your religious liberty is intact.
As time goes by, I am increasingly convinced that the real story on most of these characters is that they’re just not very intelligent and utterly incapable of grasping nuance, and I don’t care how many earned and purchased Ph.D. degrees hang on their office walls. They don’t have thoughts, and they don’t have principles they reason from; they have mental catalogs of pre-vetted stories and responses and opinions for different situations, and they’re totally lost at sea when the cranial database search doesn’t produce a script.