Subverting Rainbow Fascism

Well, it's been a long time since I've posted, but I'm back to it now.

Here is a trenchant meditation on how traditionalists in the wedding trades can defend themselves from the Rainbow Fascists who insist that everyone must celebrate! gay marriage.

The author's advice comes down to branding your business in as flamboyantly Christian and traditionalist a manner as possible. As in Adam and Eve Photography (byline: "Specializing in traditional biblical weddings") or Hetero Harmonies (for a wedding DJ).

He's being funny, of course, but not necessarily satirical. Life has leaped ahead of art to the point that real-life events like the Memories Pizza witch hunt resemble an Onion article attempting to parody a Tim Lahaye/Jerry Jenkins dystopian fantasy.

So the author of this article (who is writing under a pseudonym, presumably so that the Rainbow Fascists don't don't attack him for his articles) suggests these branding techniques with a minimum of irony.

Would any gay couple really want to sully their special occasion by inviting such evil, bigoted, politically polarizing meanies (maddeningly engaged in the completely lawful expression of their views, by the way) to their event?

I don’t think so, but then the point was never to have you provide a service for them in the first place—it was to humiliate and marginalize you, scare others of your kind into silence, and deliver a side dish of state-sanctioned duress to help everyone start thinking correctly.

Confound these expectations, and refuse to read the script you’ve been handed. “Let your light so shine” as a business built on both biblical principles and personal freedom, and make the public and regulatory confrontation gay-marriage activists want end in peaceful acquiescence on your terms, not theirs.

Can activists or bureaucrats prevent you and your staff from showing up at a wedding you’ve been contracted to work with a t-shirt that says, “We donate to the National Organization for Marriage, supporters of religious liberty—nationformarriage.org”? Perhaps not yet, but if you have positioned your business honestly and sincerely in the marketplace, it will probably never come to that, anyway.

So you’re not political, or don’t want to market your business in a politically provocative way? For now, at least, you don’t have a choice to bow out of the controversy if you’re a wedding service provider with an objection to gay marriage, or a libertarian who believes in the right to decide who you want to work for. As Pericles said long ago (a truism small wedding-related businesses are increasingly realizing): “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”

Alas, Pericles was right. We can fight against that reality or we can accept it and act accordingly.