LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 127

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to $9,000 to attend the four-year college of their
choice—to any school that “discriminates on the basis
of sexual orientation or gender identity.” So, viola!
Thomas Aquinas College and other faith-based institutions in California are now at risk of having their
students, particularly the students who qualify for
Cal grants—and it’s not the rich students, it’s students
who need financial aid to attend university—at risk
of losing those grants unless the schools cave on their
understanding of sexuality. Which is simply to say
that the administration will have a variety of ways
of going after schools. It can be your accreditation.
It can be your nonprofit tax status. It can be your
student loan. It can be your government funding for
a laboratory. There are a number of mechanisms in
which the state can say, “Unless you accept our new
definition of marriage, your ministry, your school is
going to be squeezed.”
And then lastly, I’ll mention the professionals. Some
people want to say that free exercise of religion is
just the freedom to worship. So it’s only for houses of
worship and their closely integrated auxiliaries, to use
the legal term of art. They’re wrong. The free exercise
of religion should also extend to the baker, the florist, the photographer. These are the lay faithful who
simply seek to honor God in their vocations, whether
their vocation is in a bakery, floral studio or photography studio.
And in all these examples, what we have seen are
Christians who have no problem serving gay customers, Christians who have no problem employing
gay employees; their only objection was to helping
celebrate a same-sex wedding. And so of the two most
well-known cases, one involved a 71-year-old evangelical grandmother, Barronelle Stutzman. She had
gay employees work for her. She was selling flowers
to this particular gay couple for a decade. It was only
after Washington State redefined marriage that they
asked her, “Can you do our wedding flowers?” She sat
down with one of them, and she said, “Rob, you know
how much I love you guys, but I can’t do a same-sex
wedding. I can’t use my God-given gifts and talents to
help celebrate what I believe tells a lie about the institution of marriage.” She was then sued. She was sued
in both her personal and her professional capacity,
meaning she can lose not just her business, but also
her home. She can lose not just her livelihood, but
also her life savings.
“Special Presentation”

The reason I mention that is in the neighboring
state of Oregon, a young evangelical family, Aaron
and Melissa Klein, were running a bakery called
Sweet Cakes by Melissa. They have four children
they were supporting with their bakery. They were
sued because they declined to bake a same-sex wedding cake. They were then ordered by the government to pay $135,000 in restitution for the pain and
suffering that they caused the same-sex couple by
not baking the cake. Now they were forced to shut
down their business because they were told that for
every additional same-sex wedding cake they declined to bake, they would face another lawsuit and
another fine. And one of the local LGBT groups had
organized a campaign to say they were going to get
all their subsequent wedding cakes baked at Sweet
Cakes by Melissa. So there would always be a future
case coming, and if they were open and they were
forced to decline it, there would be a future lawsuit.
So they were forced to shut down, and the husband,
Aaron, now works as a garbage collector for the
state. These are the sorts of consequences that are
already playing out in the United States as a result
of the redefinition of marriage.
Let me move on to suggest first why these things are
happening, and then second what we can and should
do in response.
First, I want to suggest that we’ve had three changes
in the United States over the past 40 or 50 years that
can explain why we see these challenges at this time.
The first is that we’ve had a change in religion. And
I start here because this is a religious gathering. I
don’t think there’s any way in which we can deny that
there have been changes in American religion that
partly explain this. First, a challenge from outside
of religion—the challenge of secularism. My former
boss, Richard John Neuhaus, described this as the
“naked public square.” It was an effort by John Rawls
and Ronald Dworkin and others to say that religion
has no role in the marketplace, no role in town hall,
no role on Wall Street. Religion is something private.
It’s only for the four walls of your chapel and along
the bedside as you say your prayers at night. But
that’s the extent of it. This is why we now see the free
exercise of religion being redescribed as the freedom
to worship.

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