The virtue most in demand

is tolerance, but it is the virtue in the shortest supply, making it very expensive indeed.   A prominent atheist -- I can't remember who precisely -- was asked the hypothetical question, "well, suppose you are wrong.  Suppose after you have died, you come face-to-face with God.  What would you say?"  He responded, "I'd ask, "who are you?  Are you Zeus?  Odin?  Shiva ..." and from there he went through a list of gods.  The one asking the question hadn't, of course, considered it from that angle.  He assumed, of course, that he would come face-to-face with the one "true" god, the god of Abraham.  Of course, even then, there is some dispute.  Is the one true god worshipped by the jews, the christians, or the muslims?  It seems, at the end of the day, that they are incompatible with one another.  Indeed, it seems that the god of the catholic christians is incompatible with the god of the protestant christians, and it was a dispute worthy of years and years of trouble in Ireland, and that assuming you discount the whole tutorial history of protestantism in the British Isles.

Religion is either a pretext or a justification for the worst forms of intolerance.  The new foray into intolerance -- the so-called religious liberty laws -- are of the worst sort.  While it is a hopeful sign that many corporate sponsors have withdrawn from those states that have enacting them, it is a less than hopeful sign that they were enacted in the first place.  The Human Rights Campaign, a lobbying group for the LGBT community, has written to the Governor of Mississippi concerning their own house bill 1523, saying:

We are disappointed to see the legislature and governor’s office pass discriminatory legislation. The business community, by and large, has consistently communicated to lawmakers at every level that such laws are bad for our employees and bad for business. This is not a direction in which states move when they are seeking to provide successful, thriving hubs for business and economic development. We believe that HB 1523 will make it far more challenging for businesses across the state to recruit and retain the nation’s best and brightest workers and attract the most talented students from across the country. It will also diminish the state’s draw as a destination for tourism, new businesses, and economic activity.

Discrimination is wrong, and we believe it has no place in Mississippi or anywhere in our country. As companies that pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming to all, we strongly urge you to repeal this bill. 

This letter was signed ostensibly by several corporate leaders, among them the CEOs of Levi, GE, Hyatt Hotels, and Pepsi.  The latter is not be a concern, of course, because Coke reigns supreme in the south, and so it came to be and passed into law.     HB 1523 is titled "Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act."  Of course, such laws already exist, and in the US it is called the first Amendment, which prohibits government from "establishing a religion, or preventing the free exercise thereof."  The second amendment, though, is written from the mutual obligations imposed by tolerance.  I will tolerate your religion, if you tolerate my religion, and we will happily thrive side by side if not together.  Of course, if one's religion demands a certain sort of "intolerance," at the moment directed at the gay and transgender community, then one cannot freely exercise one's religion if one cannot freely discriminate.  It's a bit of a conundrum.

The Mississippi law only "protects" those whose "religious beliefs or moral convictions" are the "belief or conviction that" (a) "marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman," (b) "sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage," and (c) "male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual's immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at the time of birth."   I think it endearing that they must point out that males and females are man and woman, and I think it worth pointing out that the anatomical sex at birth is not quite immutable, as Caitlyn Jenner has famously demonstrated.  They are saying, of course, that it "should be" immutable, and the Jenner episode in the news cycle probably "creeps them out" just a bit insofar as he was an athlete, a man's man, in his day.   Regardless, if one believes (a) through (c) with sincerity, then under the terms of the statute one is free to discriminate in a wide variety of circumstances outlined in the law.  I won't detail them all, but the list is relatively extensive.  You can find the text of the law and the full list of allowable circumstances at http://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us.

The law assumes a number of things, not least of which is that the "sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions" are christian and protestant.  Fundamentalist muslims are no more tolerant of homosexuality than the fundamentalist christians, and I'm sure those who sincerely subscribe to islamic law or sharia would favor just such a law.  They may want to take it one step further, but as I'm sure the evangelical community looks at HB 1523 as a "first step" in the implementation of sharia in the US ... whoops, my bad, I meant christian law ... in the sincere belief that it "expresses the highest and best goals of all societies," it being the will of allah ... whoops, my bad again, I meant simply the one true god.   As I think about this, we may be missing a golden opportunity in Mississippi.  We may bring the faithful of the christian and muslim faiths together in their common hatred of gays?  Nothing draws a community together like a common hatred ...