Nearly always when we hear about a wedding-related business owner refusing to sell goods or services to same-sex couples, the questions arise: What about people who are divorced? What about those “living in sin” or having premarital sex?
All of the above are indeed sins according to God’s word, just like homosexuality; though the gay community has a very hard time accepting that homosexuality is included as a sin, despite it being emphasized in the Bible as being an “abomination”, which implies it is a pretty serious offense.
The simple explanation as to how one sin can be “worse” than another is that God never said all sins are equal. I would encourage you to look this up, but you can’t, because…how do you look up something that doesn’t exist?
Even if all sins were equal, we can still single out homosexuality as a greater offense for many reasons:
No other sin, including all sexual sins, is celebrated the way homosexuality is. There isn’t a “Divorce Day” at Disney. There are no parades for people who choose to have sex with someone they aren’t married to. There are no special flags flying over the White House for people who engage in sex with multiple partners. More importantly, these people are not trying to normalize their behavior or force others to agree with or celebrate what they are doing. In fact, quite the opposite. Most people keep their sexual lives behind closed doors, where homosexuality used to be. They don’t get judged because they are not throwing it out there in public. There might be swingers’ clubs and strip clubs and men may visit prostitutes, but they do so in secret because they know that what they are doing is wrong.
No other sin demands that others not only “accept”, but actually encourage their sin personally and even legally. Legislation has been enacted based on with whom a person chooses to be intimate. The constitution has been re-interpreted to give gays “equal” rights, but the truth is that we all had the same equal “right” to marry someone of the opposite sex to begin with. We cannot legislate love – marriage isn’t even a “right” to begin with. In order to be a “right”, other parties would have to exist to facilitate that right. In other words, there is no guarantee that there is a spouse for every single individual who wishes to get married. What if a person falls in love with and wants to marry someone who doesn’t feel the same way? Do they have the right to mandate that individual to marry them? What if the other person is in love with someone else who loves them and wants to marry them? Who’s right super-cedes the other’s? Marriage is a privilege that if one is lucky enough to find mutual true love, can be partaken in. Wedding cake, flowers and venues are also not “rights”. We’re not talking about a gay person or couple walking in off the street, hungry for dinner or desert, or in need of flowers for the funeral of a gay person, or in need of a venue for a birthday party for a gay person and being refused based on the fact that they’re gay…because none of those things have anything to do with the fact that the person is gay. We’re talking about an individual’s RIGHT to live out their life according to their faith, which in these cases does not include helping to facilitate an ungodly, unbiblical union of two people. It’s not discrimination, it’s discretion. If we’re not careful, the next thing you know, my own cousin will be able to sue me for not attending his gay wedding as a guest because I don’t support gay marriage.
No other sin requires the sinner to be of the mindset that God specifically made them to enjoy their sin. People getting divorced don’t try to claim that God blesses their divorce. Promiscuous women don’t say, “God made me this way” – no, they feel shame in their actions (even if they don’t admit it) because they know what they are doing is wrong.
So, back to the question at hand. Why would a Christian business owner NOT turn down a divorced person? Well, let’s start with the obvious. Perhaps they do not know the individual is divorced. I’m not sure statistically how many women looking at wedding dresses go into that detail with the shop owner – why would they? Whereas it is very obvious when a couple consisting of two females comes in to try on dresses that they are lesbians, if a male/female couple were to go into a shop to look at dresses and tuxes, one would have no idea if they’d been married to other people before. I don’t see why that would even come up. But let’s say it did come up. Did the couple go into detail about why they were divorced? There are actually exceptions to divorce, particularly infidelity, in God’s eyes as Matthew 5:32 tells us: But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Another exception can be found in 1 Corinthians 7:15: But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. It’s important to note that God does not require divorce in these cases, but rather allows it. He would much rather that we work out our problems in order to keep a marriage and family intact, but realizes that in many cases the guilty party is unrepentant, nor do they genuinely wish to try to work things out. It’s also significant that it would appear as though only the innocent party is allowed to remarry. It’s not specifically stated, but it would appear as though God shows mercy upon the innocent party who did not sin against Him, which makes sense according to God’s loving nature. Another tidbit to think about is that divorce is not a lifestyle in the sense that homosexuality is. While the decision to divorce is permanent, it is not an active part of one’s day-to-day life in the sense that homosexuality is. Every day, the partners in a gay marriage are choosing to actively disobey God. And unless someone is literally getting married over and over and over with the intention to divorce every time, they are not intentionally choosing to disobey God on a daily basis.
Now, why would a Christian business owner NOT turn down a couple “living in sin” or having premarital sex? Besides the obvious that, again, how would the business owner know whether or not the couple is engaging in premarital sex, the answer to this one – if they did, in fact, know – is quite simple – because God WANTS men and women who are intimate with one another to be married. If a couple is already having sex before marriage, the natural thing for that Christian business owner to want to do would be to help the couple get married so that they are no longer sinning.
So here we have non-believers trying to use the Bible against Christians by saying they are “hiding behind their faith” when hiding is the last thing they’re doing. They are simply trying to live according to God’s will. They are not forcing it upon others, they are simply refusing to let others take away the free will God has given them and what the Constitution protects – the same constitution that many are using to try to take away the very thing it was designed to protect.
The Armentrout Shout-out 