Even though Arizona Governor Brewer has vetoed the legislation that would have allowed those with religious objections to deny service to gays, the debate will still go heatedly on. The Christian right who pushed for the passage of this bill will condemn Governor Brewer, those business groups who pressured her into vetoing it, and the gay rights movement and their supporters. However, the Christian right will also continue to push for similar legislation that has already been proposed in Missouri, Georgia, Kansas, Maine, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, and Tennessee. And I am sure that with the recent federal court decision to overturn Texas’ law against gay marriage that one will be proposed in Texas too. That will keep this issue simmering in the press for months to come.

However, I can’t help but wonder if these Christians have really thought this through in terms of their faith and beliefs. While no longer a Christian, I was at one time and still have many Christian friends and relatives. Based on knowing them and on knowing Christianity and the Bible, I think that the Christian conservatives who are supporting these sorts of laws are not following their faith faithfully. To my mind, and in the minds of many Christians too, there are three good reasons for why even a Christian who believes homosexuality is a sin should be against these laws.

First, there is the example of Jesus. He did not shun the sinners and the tax collectors, he did not refuse to see and deal with the Samaritans and the pagans. If he did not, then why should the Christian businessman of today refuse to serve gays? This refusal to deal with gays seems to me closer to the actions of the Pharisees who condemned Jesus than that of Jesus.

Now it can, and I am sure will, be argued that Jesus did so to save them, to show them the way. However, I do not believe that all such sinners were saved, and yet he still met and socialized with them. Further, consider your actions if you turn away a gay person from your business. What sort of witness does that provide?

You deal with other sinners (something I deal with in the second reason), yet you refuse to deal with them. Where is the loving acceptance? Where is the chance to show the much touted Christian love and care? Instead what you have done is shown a cold heart. You are providing a business service for a person. You do not have to condone the sin of your customers, but you should not reject the sinner in doing so – which is what the refusal to provide that business service does.

Second , why refuse to deal with gays but still deal with other sinners? Since many of the examples I have heard of deal with weddings, let me use and example appropriate for weddings.

You are a Christian baker of very conservative and very deep and sincere beliefs. Because of these, you refuse to create a wedding cake for the wedding of a gay couple. So, do you also reject the business of a Jewish and Christian couple getting married? What about the marriage of an atheist and Christian, or a Baptist and Catholic? After all, according to the Bible: “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?” 2 Corinthians 6:14 (NIV)

For many conservative Christians this is a command not to marry those of different faiths. So, for those Christians, will they continue to marry couples who are unequally yoked despite what the Bible says?

Or what about divorced couples? After all, Jesus said: “But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” Matthew 5:32 (NIV).

This means that any divorced couple who were divorced for any reason other than adultery are themselves committing the act of adultery by getting married again. Do you bake their cake, for these sinners? If you do not for gays, then, to be consistent, you should not for the divorced and for the unequally yoked. Yet I know of no one advocating for that, nor engaging in such discrimination.

So, why the double standard? Is not hypocrisy also a sin?

Further, according to standard Christian doctrine, all of humanity is fallen with a sinful nature. We all sin. Most do not repent or regret many of their sins. So, given this, why provide a cake for most sinners but not those sinners who are gay?

The problem here is two-fold. First off, homosexuality as a sin is treated differently by conservative Christians today than most other sins. Yet, it is a sin not mentioned by Jesus (adultery was, yet that does not seem to be as great a concern in regards to being a customer for a business owned by a Christian), It is not one that takes up that many verses within the Bible. Many other sins take up much more space of the Bible than homosexuality does. In fact, homosexuality does not even make it into the 10 commandments. Yet so many treat it as if homosexuality is the worst of sins, so terrible that, in their business, they will deal with all manner of other sinners except the gay sinners.

The other fold of the problem is that in taking this attitude, it assumes that the businessperson, in providing the service of his business is in some manner condoning the morality of his customer. It does not. You are providing a service, a product for the public – all of the public. Doesn’t matter if the person is a smoker, you create a wedding cake. Doesn’t matter if one is an alcoholic, has lied on their tax returns or resume, has cursed his parents and refuses to have anything to do with them, eats too much, has a bad sense of fashion, is a Muslim or atheist – you create them a cake. Your business is to create a wedding cake, and that is what it is, a business, not an endorsement.

Providing a service to the public does not mean that you condone that person’s lifestyle and choices. If it did you would have to start having people fill out a questionnaire before serving them; after which your client base would become so sparse as to force you to close your doors due to lack of viable customers.

Third, the United States has a secular government. Our founders created a secular government – the first one in the world – in order to protect the freedom for every citizen to believe as they saw fit.

While your religious beliefs may be the basis of your morals, and may be one reason why our representatives propose a law, they should not be the sole reason for our laws. There should always be some secular reason, a reason common to all regardless of religious belief, for all laws. To do otherwise would be to prefer one religion over all others in our nation, and thus set the stage for the same strife and war that we see in much of European history and in the Middle East today, and that the American colonies started to experience in the beginning. But perhaps a few examples would help bring this into focus better.

There has been a great deal of push to have the 10 Commandments posted in schools and courthouses, so let us use that as an example. And using the version of the 10 Commandments used by Orthodox and Reformed Christians (but not Lutherans, Jews, and Catholics), consider the 1st and 4th Commandments.

The first commandment – You shall have no other Gods before me. That is a commandment. It is part of your strong religious beliefs, so strong that you try to get it put into our nation’s schools and courthouses. Yet, to enact this as law would be to violate our Constitution and its religious freedoms. After all, you are first going to have to decide whose God should have no others before him. And won’t that be a fun conversation, one that will be as divisive and, probably, wind up as violent as the conversation our nation had about slavery in the mid 19th century. After all, whoever loses this argument, their religious beliefs wind up being deemed inferior and decidedly second class with only second class protections, at best.

The fourth commandment – Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. First question that comes up in making this the law of the land, whose Sabbath day? That of the Baptists, the Methodists, and the Catholics? The Jews and Seventh Day Adventists? What about the Muslim?

Then comes the question of what it means to keep it holy? This question is followed closely by one asking, what about those U.S. citizens who are not part of that religious belief? I imagine this would include, at the very least, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and Atheists. Dependent on the answer, many forms of Christianity would also be on this list. Again, what about their rights to practice their beliefs in the way they see fit, without interference from the government?

Trying to base a law solely on a religious belief is an act of exclusion and not inclusion and is what has torn nations and countries apart in the past. It is something that our founders realized and why they created a secular government. It is why there needs to be a secular reason for laws, reasons that will impact a person regardless of their religious belief. To not hold to this standard is to trade a possible short term gain for the majority religion into a long term disaster for all – including those in the majority.

And, finally, in regards to this point, do you really want your religion to be linked with the government? History has shown that linking religion to government damages both. This fact, that linking religion to government causes great harm to religion, is why it was a Puritan theologian and founder of the Baptist Church in America who first argued for a complete and total separation of church and state (one more thorough than our own today), and who then proceeded to create the first government to embrace this ideal – Roger Williams.

Final Thought – Each of the above arguments alone should be enough to make a Christian who believes homosexuality to be sinful to pause and think again before pressing for such discriminatory laws such as the one that almost passed in Arizona. Together though, these arguments support and aide each other so that the sum of these arguments is greater than each part. Laws allowing discrimination in business based upon religious belief is a bad idea, even from the standpoint of those Christians who believe homosexuality a sin.