The Culture War Comes to Walkerton

If you're planning a wedding, do you serve pizzas? I've been to a lot of weddings over the years and I don't recall anyone serving pizza. Apparently it's a thing in Walkerton, Indiana, but only in theoretical gay weddings. And because a small pizzeria in a small town suggests that they wouldn't cater a gay wedding, they must be destroyed.

From what we know about the latest skirmish in the culture war, it's apparently just fine to post a negative review on Yelp of a place that you've never visited. Just so you know. It may or may not be a problem to use Twitter threaten to burn a restaurant down if they don't cater theoretical gay weddings.

If I ran a pizzeria and had the capability to cater a wedding, I'd take the job regardless of whether the happy couple was gay or straight. But I'd sure the heck want the right to tell the Westboro Baptist Church that I didn't want their business.

As always, John Hayward gets to the heart of the matter:

This is all about the collective assertion of morality, transforming the State and activists groups into judge and jury of our souls. To extend a point from earlier this week, the anti-religious-freedom backlash is based on hypothetical abuses, possibilities, and presumed intent, not actual behavior. What matters is the alleged emotional constitution of the people who support religious liberty laws, not what they’ve actually done, or say they want to do. They are summarily stripped of the right to speak for themselves, tried and found guilty of potential offenses, with every bit of testimony offered in their defense instantly struck down as insincere. It’s like the movie Minority Report, except with a shrieking hate mob on Twitter instead of three psychics in bathtubs.

Gavin McInnes at The Federalist calls it “the invasion of the hypotheticals,” a virtual war fought in purely ideological space by people entirely disconnected from daily life in flyover country. I would add that persecuting hypotheticals is much easier than dealing with the real-world actions of actual people. Beating people up for what they might do is the easiest thing in the world, a suitably relaxed form of moral posturing for a slacktivist generation. Step One: tell a group of people you don’t like or understand what lurks in their hearts. Step Two: Win an argument with the bogeyman you just created. Piece of (gay wedding) cake!

As a Catholic, I've long been reminded that I have no idea about the condition of anyone else's soul. I might be doing it wrong.