April 9, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:08
2946 Pizza War: Gay Discrimination vs. Religious Freedom | True News
Memories Pizza in Indiana is under heavy criticism after saying that they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding because it was against their Christian religious beliefs. Indiana’s Republican Gov. Mike Pence signed the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” last week with the goal of giving business owners a stronger legal defense if they refuse to serve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender customers on religious grounds. Should businesses be forced to serve all potential customers? Should people be allowed to discriminate based on their religious beliefs? Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, takes a look at the Indiana Pizzeria controversy and the discrimination debate.
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
So, funny story, in Indiana a little while back ago, a reporter went into a pizza joint and asked an employee If that employee was Christian, and the employee said, yes, I am.
And then the reporter said, would you have any trouble serving gay people here?
And the employee said, why no, of course we wouldn't.
And then the reporter said, theoretically, if you were asked to supply pizza to a gay wedding, like that's going to happen...
Would you have any problem with that?
And the employee said, well, it's not likely that we'd really feel comfortable or happy supplying pizza to a gay wedding.
At which point, everybody went insane.
And death threats came pouring in to the pizza joints and they got voted down on Yelp and other places.
They got one stars, apparently, for their...
Political opinions or religious opinions rather than or their homophobia rather than the quality of their food and if you go and look at their restaurant listings on various review sites you can find massive amounts of extraordinarily graphic gay porn some of which I hadn't actually even seen before On all of their reviews below.
And the cultural wars commence, wherein everybody from local reporters all the way to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, are talking about how horrendous the discrimination is against the homosexuals and Tim Cook, who himself is gay, not that that really matters.
It says that, as CEO of Apple, I find it horrendous and wrong to do business with people who are homophobic.
Interestingly enough, Apple does a huge amount of business with some Middle Eastern countries wherein the penalty for being gay is being killed.
Seems to me a little bit worse for gay rights than, say, a theoretical pizza joint in Indiana delivering Pizzas to a gay wedding, which will never happen in this or any other universe.
So just to get this straight, just so people understand, homophobes should be shunned because they do not conform with gay positive belief systems.
So if you disagree with someone, then you should shun them.
That's what everyone is saying to the pizza joint.
And that's exactly what the pizza joint is saying, too.
We disagree with gay marriage, therefore we do not want to cater a gay wedding, should that ever happen, which it never will.
The only weddings where pizza is delivered are in the shadow of a trailer park, not in the Disney castle of gay marriage.
So that's all ridiculous.
Plus, I mean, you don't want to...
Cater a gay wedding because you're a homophobe.
You don't want to cater a gay wedding because they're divas and it will never be done.
You'll never satisfy them.
It's like being RuPaul's esthetician.
You will never, ever be finished and he will never be satisfied.
So that's the main reason why you wouldn't want to do it.
And this is just part of the mad hypocrisy of these modern culture wars.
Of course homophobia is wrong, but it is commanded in the Bible.
Do you know what else is commanded in the Bible?
It's shunning people who are divorced.
And there's not a lot of people who are Christians who shun people who are divorced.
Probably a few.
But this is just one of these flashpoints.
So then Indiana passed this defense of religious freedom law, which then created another firestorm.
Now, it's an old adage of people who like freedom that one government law leads to another government law.
One government program inevitably leads to another government program.
And this is the case here.
So in 1964, Civil Rights Act was passed.
Barring discrimination against specific groups, women, minorities, homosexuals, and so on.
And as a result of that, We had the joyful task as a culture, and this is true more than in America, we had the joyful task of trying to figure out, in some sort of Vulcan mindmill fashion, why somebody didn't hire someone, or why someone didn't cater their wedding, or why someone didn't let them have pizza, or anything like that.
And of course you cannot reach into human beings' minds and figure out why they're doing what they're doing, So although people in 1964 said about the Civil Rights Act, there will never be any quotas, the very next thing that happened, since we can't read people's minds, was in order to comply with the Civil Rights Anti-Discrimination Act, you had to fulfill quotas.
And that's the way it's been rolling ever since.
If people have beliefs that cause them to not want to do business with particular groups, that was, under Clinton, signed into a law that allowed for religious exemptions to the non-discrimination.
And this is how it's going to go.
One government program which says no discrimination, which can't ever really be objectively enforced since it requires mind reading in 99.9% of the cases and thus results in a quota system that does harm to everyone, So what happens is you get a government law which says no discrimination, and then you get an exemption to that government law for particular religious groups, and then the ground is laid for even more fights, even more conflicts, even more problems, and even more expansions of government programs.
Because we all know how this is going to go.
There was a baker who didn't want to bake a cake for a gay wedding and the complaints rolled in and gay activists and other activists phoned in complaints, each of which she was fined thousands of dollars for.
And the idea that you're just going to Troll people send them death threats and unjustly attack their cooking when it's their political beliefs you don't like.
This modern leftist flash mob of infinite intolerance, aggression, underhanded violence, misrepresentation, trollery extraordinaire is not how civilized people are supposed to have discussions.
Yes, it is wrong to be homophobic.
So what?
People discriminate all the time.
It is a fundamental human reality.
People discriminate all the time.
Don't like dating fat people?
Then you're probably not going to date a lot of fat people, are you?
Hey, do you think that Mormons like it when their daughters or sons marry Rastafarians?
Bet they don't.
Bet they'd prefer for their kids to marry other Mormons.
What about Jews?
Do Jews like it when their kids marry Gentiles?
Not hugely, at least not That many of them.
So there's lots of discrimination that happens all the time.
There is discrimination based on race in the dating world as well.
You know, I mean, if you live in a place with 20% Hispanics, what if your girlfriends are only 5% Hispanics?
That's a huge problem.
And let's have a quota system set up.
What is it that feminists have been saying for many years?
No means no.
You have the right to not interact with people, whether it's romantically or from a business standpoint.
I myself am forced to interact with systems and programs that I vehemently disagree with.
I'm not a big fan of empire.
I'm not a big fan of imperialism, yet my taxes are taken to pay for these monstrous programs.
I would rather keep my money and create jobs through this show rather than have the money taken away and given to people in the slow, steady, poison Chinese water torture drip of the welfare state.
Do I get that option?
I do not as much because the money is taken from me by force.
I don't like it.
That kids are put in government schools and taught all kinds of nonsense and lies about history and the role of government, the price of civilization is taxation, all this kind of nonsense.
But I make the case.
I don't phone in death threats to people.
I don't put porn on websites.
I don't downvote things.
I make my case in a reasonable, coherent, and occasionally hysterical manner.
So this is how we do things in a civilized society.
We make the case and we are patient.
Nothing serves evil more than impatience, because the way things happen right now, the way things happen right now, is people want to fix a problem.
There's discrimination against minorities, there's sexism, there's homophobia.
Yes, we should combat these things, absolutely.
But the way that people want to combat them is by giving the state more power, which means giving a small minority of people who are addicted to political power all the guns in the known universe to point at people that the mob disagrees with.
Oh yeah, that's never been a problem in history before.
I'm sure it'll be fine this time.
The whole point is you've got to walk through Mordor.
You don't just grab the ring and attempt to beat the bad guys that way.
Impatience serves evil more than almost any other human trait.
You want things done in a hurry, you turn to the state.
You get the state to pass the law, you get people terrified, you're not actually dealing with people's belief systems, you're not solving the problem in a progressive, philosophical, empirical, rational, humanistic way.
All you're doing is playing whack-a-mole with symptoms and it's a game that never, ever ends.
And you know what's going to happen next as well as I do.
What's going to happen next is that people are going to go to a gay printer and they're going to say, well, I want t-shirts that says homosexuality is a sin.
And the gay printers are going to say, I don't think so.
And then people are going to say, well, that's wrong.
That's discriminating against my beliefs.
And they're going to say, well, this is offensive to our beliefs.
And they're going to say, hey, remember that pizza place in Indiana that didn't want to theoretically serve theoretical pizzas to a theoretical gay wedding?
That was offensive to our beliefs.
And boop, boop, boop, boop.
It's a fight club all the way home, and nobody even gets any soap.
So this is the way that our society is working right now.
People aren't having rational debates.
Of course there can be rational debates about the value of homosexuality.
Nothing wrong with it.
Nothing right with it.
Of course it's not particularly, in my view, open to anyone's choice, but so what?
People say, ah, you see, well, being a Christian is open to people's choice, whereas being homosexual is not.
Okay, I'm not sure that's exactly true because there are not a lot of people who grow up in non-Christian households who become devout Christians, right?
Not a lot of people who grow up in devout Muslim households who become Christians.
So where you are born has a lot to do with the belief systems that you end up with.
So is it really open to people's choice?
Do we just sit there floating above?
The world in this giant spaceship of platonic pre-formation and say, ooh, that's the place I want to live because I really think that that Jesus guy is great.
I don't really like that other guy.
So that's where I want to go.
No, you're just born where you're born.
And that's where you happen to end up.
These are the beliefs that you happen to inculcate.
And yes, we can oppose these kinds of beliefs, but we don't do it by pointing guns at people.
Because every time you pass a law, you are arming people more.
Every time that a fine is imposed on someone, that's more Violence that has increased and exacerbated and spread throughout society.
And if we continue to use force instead of words, the world will become nothing but swords and mobs and hysteria.
And none of this has anything to do with combating homophobia.
Listen.
What are gay people really facing in society?
I mean, in the West, their per capita income is higher than straight people, so it's not like they're economically horrendously oppressed.
But throughout the world, particularly in Islamic countries and other countries as well, African countries, there are death penalties for homosexuality.
Now that is oppression.
And if you are, you know, the gay conscience of the universe, perhaps you'd be a little bit more concerned with gay people being stoned to death for their fidelities to their sexuality.
You'd be a little bit more concerned with gay people being stoned to death than people...
Maybe not delivering theoretical pizza to theoretical marriages somewhere in Indiana.
But of course, this doesn't have anything to do with protection of homosexuals.
Because if people were interested in protection of homosexuals, they'd be protesting the countries which have made homosexuality a crime.
A crime, for God's sakes.
That's where people would be focusing their moral efforts and their moral energy.
Apple might actually decide not to sell!
State-enabling technology to governments that persecute, prosecute, and slaughter homosexuals.
Maybe, Mr.
Cook, that might be a good place for you to start, wielding your economic power rather than descending like hell's own proprietary fury upon a tiny little pizza shop in Indiana whose employee made the unwise decision to talk to a reporter.
Maybe that's where you could focus your energy.
Maybe people on the left could stop harassing employees for theoretical questions about theoretical weddings and actually focus on where people who are gay are being killed.
Maybe the American government, if it's so keen on non-discrimination, could stop supplying arms and weaponry and money and expertise and soldiers to places like Saudi Arabia, where gays can be killed for Being born who they are.
Maybe that's where we should be focusing our moral efforts.
But of course this has nothing to do with protecting homosexuals.
The left is using homosexuals in the same way that they use minorities and everything to achieve political power.
This is a polarizing moment Because we're coming up to an election, Lord help us, the left is trying to paint Christians into a corner and trying to say, ah, you see, they're intolerant, they're homophobes, and this way they gin up their base.
It has nothing to do with the protection of homosexuals.
Homosexuals are being used in the pursuit of political power, which is disrespectful and dehumanizing.
To our gay friends across the world.
Let's stand up for the protection of gays where they're really being slaughtered and harmed.
I think they'll be able to survive gay weddings without their theoretical pizza.
So, these are the facts.
Study where gays are really being persecuted.
Let's stand up and protect them and forget about all this theoretical nonsense which is simply feeding into the age-old bichromatic rainbow of American political ginnying of the mob.
