Flower Power: National Security, Civil Rights and the Washington Florist

At first glance, one can be forgiven for thinking that a floral arrangement for a gay wedding doesn’t carry much significance for the essential national security of the United States of America. With perilously increasing military tensions spanning the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, one can be absolved for making such an assumption. However, the military implications of this week’s historic decision in Washington State by Benton County Superior Court Judge Ekstrom simply canNOT be understated.

Ekstrom’s watershed decision came about when a case was brought before the Benton County Superior Court when the ownership of a small flower shop, Arlene’s Flowers, refused to provide services on the professed basis of their Southern Baptist, Christian fundamentalist zeal to a frequent customer who sought arrangements for his same-sex wedding ceremony. Judge Ekstrom struck down this reprehensibly unlawful and unconstitutional behavior when he stated, “While religious beliefs are protected by the First Amendment, actions based on those beliefs aren’t necessarily protected.” Indeed, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is NOT a license for private business owners to sanctimoniously bully, marginalize, and violate civil rights as they see fit because of their alleged “relationship with Jesus Christ” (or Allah, Jehovah, Yaweh, Odin, Shiva, Spiderman etc.). Indeed, just as it isn’t a license for anyone else to engage in whatever extremist, unlawful practice they might imagine their chosen deity to prefer.

For those of us who have been leading the civil rights fight of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), the only organization devoted solely to fighting the scourge of extremist Christianity within the U.S. Armed Forces, the story is a common one. Since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), we saw that various Dominionist bigots within the military were pathetically prostituting the flimsy gauze of “free speech” as a means towards turning back this historic victory for sex & gender minorities (and by implication, all Americans) within the U.S. armed forces. Squealing like stuck pigs, disingenuously, that DADT’s repeal represented a grave offense against their so-called “religious liberty”, these reprehensibly homophobic Christian extremist predators created a virtual media cyclone of misinformation, disinformation, and bald-faced lies. As they say, “haters gonna hate.”

However, when the Religious Right echo chambers are filled with hot air, fire, and brimstone concerning some fictitious and utterly specious “War on Christianity,” monsters tend to proliferate, and sometimes we even find them in the hallowed halls of Congress. The Constitutionally-derelict Congressman John Fleming (R-LA) is one especially odious fundamentalist Christian monstrosity. Fleming, and other members of Congressman Randy Forbes’ (R-VA) “Congressional Prayer Caucus”, have repeatedly attempted to warp the meaning of “freedom to worship” via their grossly misnamed “Religious Liberty Amendments” to the recent years’ drafts of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) commonly referred to as “The Pentagon Funding Bill.” Fleming & Co.’s “Religious Bigotry Amendments” would have torn asunder the unit cohesion, military readiness, morale, good order, and discipline of U.S. servicemembers, adding ANY type of “actions and speech” (including anti-gay, theologically racist, or sectarian hate speech) to the roster of protected religious freedoms of American service members. Further still, it would offer essentially an invulnerable shield of protection for anyone who seeks to use such actions or speech to “actually harm” (i.e. grievously injure) the aforementioned compelling governmental interest of insuring maximum military unit cohesion, good order and discipline et al. At this very same time, we at MRFF stated that if these amendments were allowed to go forward, they would result in a “thoroughly dreadful nightmare of civil rights desecration wrought by a tsunami of unabated fundamentalist Christian supremacy, exceptionalism, and tyranny.”

Thankfully, the law remains the law (oh, and take a good look at the confirming, 1974 Supreme Court case of Parker vs. Levy) and the Fleming thugs’ Amendments failed, just like the attempts in court by Arlene’s Flowers to justify their hideously bigoted treatment of LGBTQ customers. Individuals’ religious beliefs may be protected by the First Amendment; however, those same individual’s ACTIONS, based upon those very same religious beliefs, are not necessarily likewise protected. Discerning Americans can see clearly that the actual goal of these fundamentalist Christian jackals isn’t at ALL the protection of their twisted “right to worship”. Quite on the contrary, their real intention is to furiously cast stones upon the “apostates”, the “disbelievers”, and those “aberrant” elements who diverge from the “flock” being shepherded by such vile “Good News Gospel” scoundrels as the Rev. Pat Robertson, Rev. Franklin Graham, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Boykin, Tony Perkins, and the rest of the Dominionist rogues’ gallery.

The allowance of such limitless religious oppression and villainy inside the U.S. military would be a national security threat of unparalleled dimension and magnitude.

However, the courageous decision by Washington state Judge Ekstrom was a decisive deathblow to the dastardly designs and craven mendacity of the embittered Religious Right. Perhaps it would be appropriate to send a floral arrangement to these barbaric wretches as a gesture of our sincerest condolences?

Hey, I like it: Perhaps a dozen black roses to celebrate the demise of their dreams of fundamentalist religious domination of our United States Constitution?