This latest Arizona law seemed a little creepy and paranoid. It substituted personal preference for faith principle. Under the law’s hallelujah principle, it allowed everybody to set the tenets of their own belief.
We are back in the looking glass zone.
In that bright tunnel, elaborated personal beliefs are the source of faith. Freedom is no longer a social promise mutually defended,
But if my freedom results in injury to you by debasement, missed economic opportunity, the denial of services and goods, I have not paid freedom forward. I have discriminated. I have sinned.
Arizona wanted to make that sin a legal right.
In the looking glass zone, a person seizes this new subjective grant of rights. In fact, the trend is toward more subjective grants.
Second Amendment grants that loudly insist on a one-way private street. More guns, fewer checks, no bans, higher deaths. Stand Your Ground laws replacing self-defense with limited and often impaired self-reflection. Defending corporations as people with unlimited political expense accounts. Filing suits to exempt people from a health care mandate so they can die uninsured.
This is Arizona’s America.
All supposedly tied to Moses’ tablets, enshrined in a law that neither Moses nor Paul would recognize; both wrestled with sin and faith in their day but never thought to drive those with whom they disagreed out of the tribe. There’s not a single market in the Bible where gay people are stoned.
~~walterrhett, Thank you Sir, For such a wise and educated commentary regarding the “craziness” that abounds in this situation. If this is “Arizona’s America” I surely hope it is contained quickly to dismantle it from spreading to other states. But I’m also quite certain, the same results would happen in other states as well. To that…I say we are on a better path to individual freedoms that are part of our constitution and the rights of the good common sense approach that has moved this country through the past up to the present day of Arizona’s defeat of this bill. Thank goodness for such common sense, and may it long be the determining factor in all future endeavors to maintain America, land of the free!
Black History 360* 
A faith that validates the insecurities of its adherents is rightly seen as idolatry. It is , as you say, a function of the looking glass syndrome. A faith that challenges us to look beyond our own insecurities toward the building of the kind of community where we see each other in terms of the justice of laws that protect each other’s right to the pursuit of happiness is what ultimately serves us best. That, is a transcendental faith. Hate is a byproduct of the over indulgence of our insecurities. The religion of bigots reeks of its foul presence.
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All faiths should be tolerant of others; looking at Hitler’s actions should remind everyone of that. People of any religion who invent danger, hatred and fear out of their imaginations run the risk of becoming as bad or worse than Hitler.
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To answer the question, “Is Arizona the new Mississippi?”, that would be a resounding….No. Mississippi is still the same old Mississippi and it’s going to be hard fought to take the title that Mississippi has worked so hard for. The good news is that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer came to her, although bigoted senses, after she garnered a little political and national attention. But it looks like the State of Mississippi is trying to get into the “Discrimination based on Religious Context” national “reality show” also. Below is a link to Mississippi SB2681 that passed the Senate and is now heading to the House of Representatives to be voted on.
Click to access SB2681PS.pdf
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