Here’s another comment from “friend #1.” He emailed it to me and asked me to post it. (He actually sent this back when the conversation was still going but I was having technical difficulties and didn’t get to it until now.)
I guess the reason I get upset when I hear about picketing at a conservative Christian school is that very often people go into a situation wanting to work through the differences verbally, but then if they don’t get the end result they wanted they resort to other means, case in point, the dating site E-Harmony. E-Harmony was created by a conservative Christian named Dr. Neil Clark Warren. A few years back the dating service was sued for not offering a gay dating service. The law suit was won and E-Harmony was forced to offer a gay dating service to complement their regular/straight service. So here is a situation where a person with conservative Christian beliefs is sued and forced to offer a dating service that is in direct violation to his morals. This was not a car dealership who denied a gay person the right to buy a car, or restaurant that wouldn’t serve a gay person, or bank that wouldn’t give a gay person a loan, or hotel that wouldn’t give a gay person a room for the night, you get the point and all of which scenarios I think would be wrong by the way, this was a non-critical service started by a Christian man. He started the service based on Christian principles and going with his conscience made a dating site for men and women that ended up being successful. Again I use the same argument here that I did for the school. Was there a shortage of gay dating sites that it was necessary to sue E-Harmony to force the founder to compromise his beliefs? Far from it. There was Match.com, Chemistry.com, Yahoo Personals, Friendfinder, Perfect Match among others that were offering services to both straight and gays. Add to that list of heavy hitters the myriad of dating services that only specifically cater to the GLBT community. So why was it exactly that E-Harmony had to be sued? This is why many conservative Christians feel that when situations arise like what happened at the school the other week that it’s only about dialogue if the person with the conservative beliefs bends. Otherwise it often seems to end up being about forcing them to bend. Religious beliefs, respect and conscience be damned! I do actually have a lot other comments regarding your response Trish from the religion angle but I’m too tired to write anymore now. 😉
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