Over the past few decades we have had a "rights" explosion on the legal landscape. We now have criminal rights, women's rights, children's rights, gay rights, animal rights and the list goes on. Certainly we have seen the growth of litigation and without a doubt one of the major causes is a mentality of rights.

It is rights mentality out of control.

Bill Perkins did an excellent job of summarizing the legal cases that included a florist, a photographer, a camping retreat and he could have had a much longer list. These examples were all cases of people being sued because of their personal views that precluded them from supporting homosexual events as a part of their business.

You see for every right I claim imposes an obligation on someone else. For each new right that is created, a whole network of laws and regulations is written to enforce the corresponding obligations. No wonder our courts are log-jammed with lawsuits. Notice the irony here. The old concept of rights was designed to limit state power - to define areas free from government interference. But the new concept of rights expands state power. It asks government to regulate all sorts of areas that once were private.

And if that doesn't work, people can resort to another form of government power - the courts. Private contracts, private conversations, the most intimate details are fair game for scrutiny by the courts. What a sad irony: as Americans demand more and more rights, we enjoy fewer and fewer freedoms.

Those supporting the "gay rights" agenda framed the argument well and won the opening round by making the issue about discrimination and not about the infringement of the deeply held religious beliefs of many or even of millennia of commonly held views of behavior and marriage. If you want to see where this is going all you have to do is look to Canada or some other European countries and the expansion of this so-called discrimination. If Pastors Putnam or Van Noy had been as public in Canada as they were here they would have been subject to fine or imprisonment or both for their "hate speech." Pastors, priests and rabbis like this are told that their views of absolute truth is "hateful" and discriminating to others.

Darrow Miller had a quote recently that summarized this perfectly:

"Moral relativism - ideological pluralism - has as its fundamental virtue, tolerance. This leads to two realities. First it engenders moral anarchy in a society and will ultimately bring government tyranny to impose social order. When tolerance is the ultimate virtue, the only vice is belief in moral and metaphysical absolutes. This leads to the second reality, intolerance of those who believe in the possibility of truth. A kind of intellectual absolutism that denies the fundamental principles of reason, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech is the result. Moral relativism is the product of fundamentalist atheism and will lead in the near term to social anarchy and in the longer term to a repressive tyranny."

To those that think this is an exaggeration let me give you some recent examples in addition to the court cases cited by Mr. Perkins. The Boy Scout decision was still not acceptable to the homosexual community and because of this the California Legislature has pending legislation to strip the Boy Scouts and any other organization of their tax exempt status if they continue in any way to discriminate against homosexuals. Catholic Charities of Boston announced that they were getting out of the adoption business. One of the oldest adoption agencies they had long specialized in finding good homes for hard to place kids. Since they would not place children in homosexual homes they were threatened with similar restrictions and would lose any tax exempt status. This tactic has spread to other cities. As we have seen in recent stories about the IRS, the threat from the State as tax collector can be used as a very big stick against views you don't like.

Where does this end? Does the "sexual harassment legislation" become an instrument in schools and workplace to suppress religious speech? We are seeing this already in government, schools and many corporations. What effect will Wednesday's Supreme Court decision have upon churches and religious charities? Can they continue to oppose gay marriage and call homosexuality a sin and still keep their tax exemption? Will churches keep a real estate exemption with a city that carries this to an extreme?

In his book entitled "The Family Under Siege," George Grant documents a chilling list of gay demands gleaned from the "Advocate," the nation's most prestigious gay magazine. These demands include the endorsement of homosexuality by all religions, the removal of antihomosexual passages from the Bible, and the indoctrination of the young in homosexual behavior. Finally and most ominous, the magazine calls for the expurgation of "ugly and ignorant homophobia" through the use of "heavy punishments" and "public humiliation."

The radical gay agenda is predicated upon the widely propagated notion that homosexuals are an oppressed minority who are only reacting against unbearable injustice. Unfortunately the Coeur d'Alene City Council bought into a lie and a road that is fraught with unintended consequences.

My suggestion is that if they don't repeal this bad law that they consider adding a new one: "It is illegal to pretend that you are homosexual in order to gain special privileges." Otherwise I suspect many that are denied some right are going to have a new avenue for litigation and some enterprising individuals will take advantage.

Bob Shillingstad is a Hayden resident.