can he say that?

I'm guessing the following by Doug Wilson will upset people on both sides of the(se) issue(s). Me, I agree with the point.

Comes now the NFL, on the cusp of bringing in their first openly gay player, and they are also contemplating banning the n-word and the other eff-word at the same time.

The Left is currently attempting quite a hat trick — they are unleashing, simultaneously, their inner wowser, their inner totalitarian, and their inner lust monkey. The results are not pretty — it is a kind of warp spasm of irrational overreach.

This is classic overreach. It was just a matter of weeks ago that we were being told that an abandonment of the Defense of Marriage Act would leave states free to make their own decisions on the matter, yay federalism, and so what happened? Since lo, these many weeks ago, federal judges have now been striking down state laws, one after the other.

Some people might have thought — not me, incidentally — that homosexual activists were going to pursue their agenda with a modicum of judicial restraint, ascending the bench of public opinion in a black robe in order to issue carefully reasoned arguments that would cause thoughtful people everywhere to consider what they had to say. But ten minutes after their initial victories, all the restraint evaporated, by which I mean to say that it all went away. They are now pursuing their agenda by means of a metaphorical parade through the Castro District, wearing nothing but a thong and a sombrero with mangoes and grapes all over it.

They want this all to be part of the great March of Progress — Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall, and any other Sibilants they come up with — and they never tire of comparing what they are doing to the Civil Rights Movement, looking around for the Jackie Robinson of sodomy. Now other writers have done a good job pointing out the false comparison — God created black skin and God prohibited this particular vice. So I do not need to develop that thought further. It has been done well already. What I actually want to point out is the similarity in what is going on.

In the pre-civil rights era, segregation was imposed and enforced by the government making laws that prohibited private citizens from undertaking any free market integration on their own. When that folly came crashing down, as it should have, some thought it would be a good corrective to prohibit a private citizen running a public business from making such sinful choices on his own. But this was just the coercive hand of the state from the other direction, a heavy hand that is now being used on evangelical photographers and bakers.

Laws should be used to combat crime, not sin, and certainly not faux-sin. What the legislation in the civil rights era ought to have done was strike down every form of the government’s own discrimination against blacks, and its mandating of discrimination elsewhere, and left it there. If Bubba still wanted to exclude blacks from his ribs joint, then that was Bubba’s problem, and Bubba’s loss. Everybody’s money is the same color.

Bigotry is a real sin, but because the state pretended that it had the expertise to deal with real sin through law, we have now come to the pretty pass of them thinking that they can deal with faux-sin through a law. But all they can do is impose mischief with a law.

Businesses have a clear and obvious right to discriminate based on behavior. No shoes, no shirt, no service works because no shoes and no shirt is a behavior. So is ordering a cake with two grooms on it. So is requiring a black baker to bake a Confederate battle flag cake. So is requiring a graphic designer married to a compulsive gambler to design a billboard for the local casino. So when you, for arbitrary and capricious reasons, define someone’s personal vice as an essential part of their personal identity, and link it with iron bands to their constitutional rights, you are making a royal hash of everything.

It has gotten to risible levels. So now people who strap on pads and who run into each other at full speed for a living are going to be told that if they use particular prohibited words, words that will bruise the petals of the taunted linebacker in question, they will be fined. Got it. Today the linebackers of the NFL, tomorrow . . . the linebackers of the Internet, which I hope would include Mablog.

They will come to me and demand circumlocutions. They will want me to pretend that free speech is still operative, and yet they will insist on the passive voice, and oblique indirection. And so I will do my best and will say that if circumlocutions are required of me, at the end of the day, when all things are considered, in the course of any proffered argument that I might want to advance concerning certain persons who are individual practitioners of that class of actions historically understood as faggotré . . .

“That’s it, bub.” I find myself in court, looking at a $250 fine, and ten counseling sessions.

“How do you plead?”

“Your honor, I will be the first to admit that my French is not the best . . .”

“How do you plead?”

“Not guilty, your honor.”

“And yet you acknowledge that you used the word . . . the word spelled f-a-g-g-o-t-r-é?”

“Yes, your honor. I did use that word . . .”

“How was that not a violation of the ban on the eff-word? The Constitutional Amendment concerning this passed a entire year ago.”

“Your honor, I didn’t know that was the word. I thought the eff-word law was referring to fudgepacker.”

There was a loud clatter as the court reporter fell out of her chair, and some moments before things were all recombobulated.

“You can’t use that word either!”

“Well, which word is the law referring to?”

“You can’t use any eff-words.”

“I see that I can’t be too careful. Can I use fruit?”

The judge said no, but not without a hesitating and possibly illegal glance at the plaintiff. 

“Flamboyant?”

“I . . . I don’t think so. Look, that will all be covered in the counseling sessions, where you will almost certainly be going to for the next ten weekends.”

“What about free speech? Can I say free speech?”

“That’s the worst eff-word of all. No, you can’t that. Not any more. All done with that.”

Sorry, judge, but I was not quite done.

I have had to explain this before, but let me conclude by saying it again. It is our duty to be transgressive. Prior to the rise of homosexual activism, I had never once in my life taunted a homosexual because of his vice, whether with word, gesture, or epithet. I was not brought up that way, and I simply wouldn’t do it. But the pretense — and that is what it is, pretense — that these speech codes are being designed to address that particular problem is simply bogus.

And since the rise of “gay pride,” I haven’t taunted victims of vice under these new circumstances either. Why would a preacher of grace taunt victims of sin? What kind of ministry goes around kicking sad people?

So what am I doing then? Consider the difference here:

“When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (John 8:10-11O).

“Such is the way of an adulterous woman; She eateth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness” (Prov. 30:20).

There is no difference in the one sin (adultery), but a huge difference in the other — which is contrition v. the sin of high-handed arrogance in the second example. The grace of God teaches us to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Those who are enslaved by the chains of vice should receive nothing but sympathy and grace from Christians. Nothing but.

But there is a category of sin that is scripturally outside this “no fly zone.” This would be the cluster of sins that can be grouped as pride, arrogance, malice, spite, insolence, blasphemy, haughtiness, and hearts that are fat like grease. Those who rattle their chains, declaring them to be wings, with which they will soar far above our tired old ethical categories, need to be treated like the wizened old Pharisees they are. This is something I am happy to do, and as a preacher of grace, I am required to do by Scripture. Rough treatment for Pharisees is something prescribed by Scripture, not proscribed by it.

So would I ever taunt a slave of a particular sexual sin with a word like faggot? Of course not. But when these Pharisees of Phootball are falling all over themselves to ban the ph-word — and all driven by an insolent spiritual pride that represents our current apostate elites very well — I am more than willing to have some phun over their phailures of imagination when it comes to fallic placement. It’s their pride that makes it so funny.

Some people might think I am just being bad, but I hope to assure them that I am just getting started. Comstockian sodomites are the worst, and when I am finally convicted of renegade free speechery, and ascend the scaffold to be hanged, and I survey the assembled crowd eager to see the First Amendment defended, I will try to make a point of saying so again.

“Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth” (John 9:41).