“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
Growing Dominion, Part 36
Discrimination used to be a good word, and it is still possible to use it that way in some settings (e.g. “He is a man of discriminating taste.”) But for the most part, our modern thought police have seen to it that the word discrimination has entered into the lexicon of bad things. Christians should understand that the current pc-codes are not spiritually authoritative (even though they now inform much of what passes for law). But this does create a question for us as we seek to build our businesses. How should we respond to the criminalization of certain sins that should not have been criminalized? Further, how should we respond to the criminalization of certain virtues? And how do we keep from lumping all such activity under the bad old heading of “discrimination?”
“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” The reasons for such a refusal will be as varied as the owners and proprietors of establishments are. Sometimes the refusal will be based on the nature of the establishment (e.g. “no shirt, no service”), sometimes it will be based on the sinful bigotries of the owner (e.g. refusing service to blacks), and sometimes it be based on the moral values of the landlord (e.g. no rental agreements offered to homosexual couples). Now let us assume for a moment that we still lived in a free country, which meant that the private owner of an establishment could be as bigoted as he wanted to be (with his own property) without fear of legal reprisal from the civil government. The fact that something should be legal does not make it righteous. There should be no civil law, for example, against covetousness, and covetousness is certainly a sin. Now such a man’s discrimination could either be sinful or righteous. Not all sins should be counted as crimes. And some non-crimes are emphatically sins.
Discrimination is inescapable. The only question concerns the standard of discrimination, and the enforcement mechanism for dealing with wrong forms of discrimination. This means that if a white man opened a restaurant that refused service to blacks (simply because of their skin color), it should be perfectly legal for him to do so. At the same time, it should be perfectly legal for his church to excommunicate him for it (which they should do, barring repentance), and for others to avoid his establishment, and so on.
Ultimately this means that we can only fight ungodly discrimination if we reserve to ourselves the right to discriminate. The tendency of our modern, overweening state is to “fight discrimination” by means of law, and the end result is that we lose our legal right to discriminate about anything.