Letter: ‘Love thy neighbor’ has yet to sink in

From: Doug Logan

Columbus

The promoters of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act would have us believe that they don’t want to discriminate against anybody.

They just don’t want the government telling us that we can’t apply our religious scruples in deciding how we treat customers. Stop right there and think about it.

Do you understand that our grandparents and great-grandparents applied the same argument to justify Jim Crow laws? The only difference is that 75 years ago they cited verses like, I think, Daniel 2:43, the one about not mixing iron and clay.

How does it happen that the followers, or so they claim, of a man who said things like, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and especially “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” are so hatefully intolerant? A bunch that claims to believe in ministering to others seems to have become awfully picky about to whom they will minister.

So, all these years after Brown vs. Board of Education, all these years after Selma, all these years after the Civil Rights Act, we still need our government to make us treat each other equally. Because the moral teachings of what bills itself as the major religion of America are too weak to convince its followers to do what’s right.

Christians, heal yourselves.