Don't use a hammer to drive a screw!

    Recently the Supreme Court threw out a court ruling by an Oregon court to force a Christian-owned bakery to pay $135,000 in fines for refusing to bake a wedding cake for gay couple.  Regardless of which side of the gay-marriage issue you stand on; the SCOTUS decision was the right one in my opinion and it will benefit all of us.  The problem stemmed from the Oregon state anti-discrimination law which forced all the people of Oregon to get in line on gay-marriage and ruled that one could be compelled by a government to turn away from their religious faith and to say whatever people want them to say.     The SCOTUS ruling dictates limits on such laws and that the government has no say in such matters.

    This is not just a win for religious freedom but also a for an individual's right to their freedom to speak, or in this case, NOT to speak.   All Americans won with this ruling and not just Christians.

     At the heart of the issue is people using the wrong tool to fix what they perceive as a problem.  Back in the 1960's we had a problem of segregation in the US.  This problem took 2 separate forms.  The first was in the separating of the schools into White-only and Blacks-only schools.   This was enforced by the local governments and the school boards that ran the schools.  It was a government initiated problem and therefore it needed a government-initiated solution to end the problem because government problems are typically immune to free-market responses like boycotts etc.   The famous case of Brown-vs-the-Board-of-Education was brought before SCOTUS which decided that "WE THE PEOPLE" cannot be read as "WE THE WHITE PEOPLE" and "WE THE BLACK PEOPLE" and therefore governments cannot provide segregated services even if they can be assured to be "equal".     This is a case of a hammer driving a nail.  

     At the same time in the 1960's there was segregation occurring at the private institution level.  One of the most prominent was the separation of blacks and whites on public buses.   MLK saw the problem and found the right answer to the problem.  He did not run off to the courts to force the bus companies to end their segregation.   Instead MLK lead one of the most successful boycotts of the bus system to force these companies to end their appalling programs.  It did not take long for the bus companies to realize their dependence on the black community and it hit them where it hurt them the most:  their pocket books!  A free-market-solution solved a free-market problem.  This was an outstanding case of a "screwdriver driving in a screw".  MLK used the right tool for the right problem and all Americans benefited from his wisdom.

 
      Now come 50 years later and we have lost our abilities to distinguish nails from screws anymore.  Today, too many on the left, view everything as a nail and see only a hammer (the government) as the solution to be used.  The case of the Oregon baker's vs the Oregon state government is a perfect example of a hammer being used to drive a screw.  You may not agree with their decision to not bake a case for a gay-wedding but forcing someone to do something their conscience is not right either.   Do we really want a country where people lay in fear for what they believe?   Do we really want a country of people who "turn off their conscience" and do what the government dictates?   A conscience is a terrible thing to waste in my opinion.  I would rather have a country full of people acting on their conscience and analyzing their morals and ethos rather than a country full of mindless, morally bankrupt and soulless beings.

     I believe the real solution would have been for the gay-community and it's protractors to launch a boycott of the bakery.   If enough people stop buying from them then they will go out of business unless those who support their beliefs back them up monetarily.  There was no reason to use the "hammer" in this situation as there was no governmental influence forcing the gay-couple to purchase from this bakery.

    Maybe now, we can get back to using hammer-for-nails and screwdrivers-for-screws and create a more fair, reasonable and moral country again.