"The Left" is Actually Obsessed with Cake

Sen. Ted Cruz has addressed LGBT rights again, and once again the best way I can describe our differences is "cake or death."

What Cruz has to say about "the left" and our weird support of gay rights is:

"Is there something about the left — and I am going to put the media in this category — that is obsessed with sex?" Cruz asked reporters at an event in Beaumont, Texas, according to the Texas Tribune.

"ISIS is executing homosexuals — you want to talk about gay rights?" Cruz continued. "This week was a very bad week for gay rights because the expansion of ISIS, the expansion of radical, theocratic, Islamic zealots that crucify Christians, that behead children and that murder homosexuals — that ought to be concerning you far more than asking six questions all on the same topic."

Cruz railed against "mandatory same-sex marriage" and criticized a reporter for asking about his views on gay marriage, according to the Texas Tribune.

Nobody on the left gives two damns about what consenting adults (key words, "consenting" and "adults") do in their private time. What we are concerned about is a public issue--how LGBT people's rights are respected in employment, in commerce, in not being harassed in schools, workplaces, or the street, and in being able to form property contracts with the partner of their choosing. It's not the sex--after all, Lawrence v. Texas used equal treatment under the law to invalidate anti-sodomy laws that discriminated specifically against LGBT people, and the accomplished attorney Cruz should be well aware of that case. The movement for equality is about rights that extend beyond the bedroom, but do not extend beyond those that straight people already enjoy.

So it happens that when Governor Pence or Governor Jindal enshrine a tradition that excludes certain people as a class by elevating the distinction of other people's religious prejudices, they are actually violating the equal treatment concept. They are saying that some classes (where that class is picked out by some but not all persons as uniquely deserving of being so singled out--and which should not exist as a class by law because we should presume equality) get to be treated differently because some other class (religious people, whose faith exemption from the law of the land is taken at face value because they have shouted the equivalent of "dibs-no homo!") is being given special treatment.

To either not understand the distinction because it is too outside of one's ideological box to grasp it, or to be able to well and truly able to grasp it in principle, but be quite cozy in not grasping it in practice, are both hallmarks of a craven mind. Yeah. I went there.

Also, and I am so glad Ted Cruz brought this up--ISIS is not the standard by which Americans should judge our conduct. Saying that any group should be content with less than full equality because elsewhere they might face death is a cop-out. We are not like ISIS here. But this does not mean that we should be satisfied with just not being ISIS. I woke up this morning, and I was not an axe-murderer. Is that my standard?

Comparing ourselves to the worst of humanity is a fairly disgraceful scale. We torture, but seldom with rape. We use mines, but not in the fields where children farm. We drone, but mostly we go after "evil-doers". But the reason Sen. Cruz seems comfortable with this comparison is because he doesn't have a problem with the discrimination itself. Only the degree--like a whore, we know what he is and are quibbling about his price.

And I, on the other hand, know what that discrimination is like, to a degree, and realize that there are Americans who aren't all that removed from ISIS on this score.

The choice is cake or death. The Left will always go with cake. This is because we are not out of our damn minds.