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by Speaker to Animals » Fri Oct 13, 2017 2:48 pm
Knowingly providing goods or services for an act that is immoral is called material cooperation. Baking a cake for a homosexual wedding is not something a Christian should ever be doing, but a cake in most other contexts is fine. It's the sacrilegious wedding that is the problem.
Likewise, for this homosexual coffee shop owner, providing a physical space for this group to meet and discuss their pamphlet campaign constituted material cooperation with that campaign. He became a part of it when they used his property and services to hold meetings.
In the case of bakers, if all you did was purchase a generic wedding cake without telling them it's for a homosexual wedding, and put your own statue topping on it, the baker would not have cooperated with it. He wouldn't even know.
The easiest example that most people can recognize is imagining an abolitionist blacksmith in the Antebellum south. If he gets an order for a batch of slave shackles to be produced, he'd be guilty of material cooperation with an inherently evil practice. I think most of us would say FUCK NO to the idea that the state could force us to cooperate with human slavery today (assuming slavery were still legal). The difficulty is in the fact that most people lack the self-awareness and objectivity to place themselves in other people's shoes to recognize the general principle. If they don't personally disagree with the act being objected to, then they don't see the problem. It's only when you point out possible scenarios where people could be forced to participate in acts they actually do see as morally repugnant that they begin to grasp the principle involved. Just another reason why democracy didn't work out, really. Most people lack the mentality to think about social and political problems in terms of general principles.
In the case of slavery, it was exactly this totalitarian and coercive mentality that led to the split. Southern states, when in control of the federal government, passed the Fugitive Slave Act that forced all other Americans to participate in slavery one way or another. They couldn't care less about the conscience rights of their fellow Americans. Even when you think you are right because you agree with individual circumstances of a story, when you find yourself taking the arguments of antebellum slave holders (which the Left has been doing in spades of late), you should at the very least step back from the problem and try to look at it more generally and based upon principles. The right of conscience is one of those basic principles that we ought never impugn since it really is the right of the freedom of thought.
Last edited by Speaker to Animals on Fri Oct 13, 2017 2:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.