Especially when your target knows more about what the Nazis did than you do. When your victim has been personally affected by it. When it’s not just cheap rhetoric to the guy you’re using it against.
Back in 2012, a Colorado baker named Jack Phillips was sued for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. He refused on religious grounds, and the case has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Now, Kelsey Harkness at the Daily Signal has done something Phillips’ critics refuse to even try: She talked to him like a human being.
In 2014, Colorado Civil Rights Commissioner Diann Rice compared Jack Phillips, a Christian baker who was sued for declining to make a cake for a same-sex ceremony, to perpetrators of the Holocaust…
Little did Rice know, Phillips’ father fought in World War II, and saw many of the Holocaust atrocities for himself.
Here’s what Rice said:
Revealed: Colo. commissioner compared cake artist to Nazi from ADF Media Relations on Vimeo.
And here’s Phillips’ reaction:
You’re not going to persuade this man that your opinion is the right one by comparing him to the Nazis. You’re just going to make him, and people who agree with him, bitter and resentful.
Here’s an idea. If you go to a bakery and ask for a cake for your gay wedding, and the baker turns down your business… Go to another bakery. Spend your money somewhere else.
Why the hell would you even want to eat a cake that was made by somebody who’d rather go all the way to the Supreme Court than bake it for you? Assuming you force this man to do what you want, what incentive does he have to make the cake any good?
And if you actually care about anybody but yourself: How does forcing someone else to act against his will bode well for your marriage? Why ruin what’s supposed to be a happy occasion by going out of your way to make someone else miserable? Isn’t that setting a bad precedent for your eternal union?
This is no longer about accepting gay people, if it ever was. It isn’t about tolerance. It’s about coercion. It’s about about using the power of the state to exact vengeance on dissenters. It’s about punishing religious expression.*
*Well, it all depends on the religion. Suing a Muslim bakery could get you killed, right?