Emily,
Yes. To all your questions.
I've read the proposed bill, for example.
It does absolutely nothing new. Homosexuals can invoke it to stave off frivolous lawsuits or stand on it as an immediate defense, just like anyone else, should they object to providing a service or product that would compel them to participate in any activity or express any thing that is morally/religiously abhorrent to them. The bill protects the First Amendment rights of everyone, and it's predicated on established natural, constitutional and case law. There's nothing new here! However, it's being asserted in the face of the left's relentless legal attacks on individual liberty and free association relative to the prerogatives of private property and parental authority.
Let me put a finer point on the matter. Jones is making up law as he goes along. The principle of public accommodation does not trump the imperatives of the First Amendment. That cannot be repeated too often.
The laws that Christians are fighting in certain states right now are nothing more than the ongoing attempt of leftist politicians to bully, harass or financially destroy their political opponents and bombard the federal courts with challenges in which they hope to overturn established case law.
Jones’ blather is nonsense. It's the propaganda of a relentless campaign against individual liberty and free association by collectivists.
The link below features just one of the many examples in case law, cited by OriginalShroom, governing the limits of the principle of public accommodation relative to the paramount concerns of the First Amendment, wherein the Court has always broadly come down on the side of the latter.
http://www.usmessageboard.com/polit...les-human-rights-complaint-3.html#post8694928
Jones’s drivel is the tyranny of mob-rule collectivism verses individual liberty. His tripe is the stuff of Plato, Rousseau and Marx verses the classical liberalism of the Anglo-American tradition of our founding, the imperatives of natural law, the greatest proponents of which are Augustine, Calvin, Locke, Montesquieu and the Founding Fathers. This is the fascism of communism/Nazism verses the sociopolitical philosophy of the Declaration of Independence.
America is now rife with pc, multicultural nitwits who don’t grasp the ramifications of the agenda they‘ve been spoon fed in the public schools and by popular culture, which does not empower them at all, but empowers the government to systematically strip away rights and oppress. The elites get it, and regard these useful idiots as stampeding cattle trampling those of us who resist them.
Make no mistake about it, Christians and orthodox Jews are the number one target.
Why?
Because we unrelentingly stand on the imperatives of natural law, the indispensable structure of which entails the biological family and parental authority, and the sanctify of human life, the very first principles of private property, which in turn constitutes the indispensable foundation of liberty, backed by an armed citizenry, the ultimate check against government usurpation.
The Anglo-American tradition of classical liberalism is extrapolated from the sociopolitical ramifications of Judeo-Christianity’s ethical system of thought. This is the sense in which American is a Christian nation, properly understood for decades by Americans, today, muddled by virtually everyone. This notion has nothing to do with theocracy. It merely goes to Judeo-Christianity’s assertion of universal individual liberty and free association predicated on the construct of universal free will. Hence, God, not the state, is the Source and Guarantor of human rights and dignities; they are, therefore, inalienable and absolute, granted to all unreservedly whether one be a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, an agnostic, an atheist and so on. . . .
One cannot extrapolate that universal principle from any other ideology under the sun but Judeo-Christianity! All other religions deny the actuality of human free will and are collectivistic in nature.
The leftist sheep of today have been conditioned to believe the revisionist claptrap that biblical Christianity plunged the West into the Dark Ages. Hogwash! It was the statist and corrupt Roman Catholic Church that suppressed biblical Christianity! The Reformation was the second breakout of biblical Christianity that made the Enlightenment and the democratization of the West possible.
Jefferson’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is a paraphrase of Locke’s triadic construct of life, liberty and private property. “The pursuit of happiness” is a term of art denoting the totality of one‘s private property, including one’s own being, the members of one's immediate family for whom he is responsible and the entirety of his assets or the fruits of his labor.
Locke is not merely the father of classical liberalism, but the preeminent political philosopher relative to America’s founding ethos. It is he who in his
Two Treatises of Civil Government perfected the construct of natural law, firstly extrapolated from scripture by Augustine and further developed by Calvin in terms of a formal system of sociopolitical thought. Locke’s exposition of natural law is predicated on the teachings of the Bible, his formal epistemological justification, backed one scriptural citation after another. That’s right. The man who perhaps more persuasively than any other of the Enlightenment argued against the evils of monarchy and theocracy, and the right of men to violently overthrow usurpative government based his apology for liberty on the Bible’s moral imperatives.
But this only surprises the historically illiterate, as statism is the stuff of idolatry and tyranny. God is the only legitimate ruler of the people relative to the principle of universal free will.
It’s no accident that today’s leftists, particularly in Europe, but increasing here in America as well, starting with the radical leftist professors in our universities and colleges, are generally anti-Semitic and hostile to the nation of Israel. It’s no accident that today’s leftists generally despise Christians as they slobber all over the backsides of Muslims, whose religious ideology is no less collectivist and statist.
