Our society seems to have confused human behavior with skin color, ethnicity, and gender. Most people believe that human beings have a choice in their behaviors. They may be strongly influenced by peer pressure, heritage, inner cravings, heredity, personal compulsions, or other factors; yet they have the freedom to choose whether to act on those influences or to resist those influences.
A person, however, did not choose his/her skin color, ethnic origin, or gender. Those were bestowed on him at birth. Our country has a cruel history of mistreating people because of their physical characteristics. The Civil Rights movement did much to help remedy that cruel discrimination (although we still have a long way to go) and a year ago, in Washington DC, ground was broken for a well-deserved memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nowadays many people, however, are trying to apply the civil rights philosophy to behavior choices. They claim that people who choose certain behaviors deserve the same rights as the people with physical characteristics like darker skin. They even want public approval of their chosen behavior. This seems to me to be very inconsistent.
We all discriminate every day against people because of their behavior choices. The government puts those who choose to sell drugs in prison and yet no one acts out for "dealers rights" (not even drug dealers themselves). Employers hire and fire people based on their behavior choices -- is that not discrimination? We all discriminate in our choice of friends based on their behaviors and/or beliefs. We even discriminate against nudists wearing their favorite attire in public places.
Now discriminating against a person's behavioral choices doesn't mean being mean or cruel to him/her (except for the government's approach to the drug dealers and others who engage in behavior defined as "criminal" -- and most people believe they earned their punishment). But behavioral discrimination does deny approval.
So why should I be forced to approve (or at lease act like I approve) of a person's behavior choices? If a person constantly uses profanity and repeatedly refers to sexual intercourse and feces in his/her conversation, don't I have a right to voice my disapproval of that behavior and to choose to avoid contact with that person? I don't have a right to hurt him but I do have the right to disapprove of his chosen vocabulary.
Today the rights of those of us who believe in Biblical morality are being attacked. We are being called "unkind", "mean-spirited", "unloving", "homophobic", "narrow minded", and other negative words because we cannot approve of certain behavior choices. Is this fair? |
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