Some persons are more equal than other persons.

Court rules that corporation can be an African-American person.

 

A business owner brings his values and his entire self—his faith no less than his race—to his daily work. The government shouldn’t force him to violate his conscience.

Did you know that a for-profit corporation can be African American? Actually, a court recently ruled that a corporation can be an African Americanperson under federal law.

This legal declaration did not come from an eccentric free-market theorist. Nor can it be found in the “dreaded” Citizens United Supreme Court case. It was affirmed earlier this month, on March 6, as the overwhelming consensus view by an Obama appointee to the Fourth Circuit court of appeals. The rulingallows minority-owned companies to object to racial discrimination committed against them under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This ruling illustrates a larger dichotomy—arguably a hypocrisy—in the public debate over the upcoming Obamacare cases involving the Hahn family’s Conestoga Wood Specialties (my client) and the Green family’s Hobby Lobby Stores, and whether the government should have the power to coerce family businesses to provide abortion products in their health plans.

The fundamental reality in the Conestoga and Hobby Lobby cases has long been recognized by the courts, including San Francisco’s Ninth Circuit: when a family seeks to earn a living in business, it brings its religious values to the table. And if the government threatens it with massive fines unless it violates its religious practice, the family and its business get their day in court.

A gaggle of special interest groups supporting Obamacare’s coercion is outraged at this suggestion. They profess to be shocked—shocked!—that anyone would say a family business has religious freedom. But these same groups apparently favor a legal regime that says for-profit corporations can be racial minorities and can exercise the most intimate and private constitutional “rights” to contraception and abortion. Their outrage is withheld until families in business claim to be religious.

Here's the problem when someone is locked in the "iron cage of secular rationalism"...

...they may discover that other people do not agree with their view of the secular good.

Nobel peace prize winner defends law criminalising homosexuality in Liberia.

The Nobel peace prize winner and president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has defended a law that criminalises homosexual acts, saying: "We like ourselves just the way we are."

In a joint interview with Tony Blair, who was left looking visibly uncomfortable by her remarks, Sirleaf told the Guardian: "We've got certain traditional values in our society that we would like to preserve."

Liberian legislation classes "voluntary sodomy" as a misdemeanour punishable by up to one year in prison, but two new bills have been proposed that would target homosexuality with much tougher sentences.

And:

Blair, on a visit to Liberia in his capacity as the founder of the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), a charity that aims to strengthen African governments, refused to comment on Sirleaf's remarks.

When asked whether good governance and human rights went hand in hand, the British former prime minister said: "I'm not giving you an answer on it."

"One of the advantages of doing what I do now is I can choose the issues I get into and the issues I don't. For us, the priorities are around power, roads, jobs delivery," he said.

Over his 10 years as prime minister, Blair became a champion for the legal equality of gay people, pushing through laws on civil partnerships, lifting a ban on gay people in the armed forces and lowering the age of consent for gay people to 16.

A Catholic convert, he called on the pope to rethink his "entrenched" views and offer equal rights to gay people. But gay rights, he said, were not something he was prepared to get involved in as an adviser to African leaders.

Wham! Multiculturalism runs head-on into political correctness!

Because obviously you can lecture the pope, but lecturing a Nobel peace prize winning president of a Third World Country would just be presumptious of Blair.

A more serious point is that this highlights the point made in Steven D. Smith's "The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse." Today, no one can seriously say that "accepting homosexuality" has no effect on anyone else. If there is one thing that recent history shows it is that the people who start out arguing for decriminalization pretty quickly start to criminalize the conduct of other people who are minding their own business, whether it is making cakes or officiating at marriages.

In the West, the position championed by Blair has been based on a "smuggling" of concepts which have never been seriously vetted. The reason is that these concepts are not self-evident and not something that can be discovered through pure secular reasoning.

Consequently, when faced with someone like Sirleaf, what can Blair say? All he's got is his muzzy intuition that everyone ought to agree with him because he has "reason" itself on his side. If someone doesn't agree with him, all he - and other people on his side - can do is yell louder or resort to some kind of force, such as linking foreign aid to the Western politically correct agenda.

Hope and Change...

...if you are part of an official minority group that Obama cares about!

Mark Shea writes:

Victory! Obama Administration Allows Conscience Exemption…

for Native Americans whose conscience wants to kill federally protect and endangered bald eagles.

Catholic consciences? “Screw ‘em,” says our God King.