The CP Edit: True love’s kiss

In the children’s fairy tale of yore, Snow White took an ill-advised bite from the evil queen’s poison apple. The deathlike sleep induced by the toxic fruit could only be broken by the kiss of true love.

We offer the popular Disney parable as a metaphor for the City of East Lansing’s ongoing legal skirmish with the Country Mill, a local apple orchard that unapologetically discriminates against the LGBTQ+ community by prohibiting same sex marriages at its farm in Charlotte. As a result, the city – the first in the nation to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation — contends that it can legally bar Country Mill from selling at the municipal farmers market.

As a new year unfolds, we hope and wish the Country Mill owners would set aside their litigious pursuits and do the right thing: Living up to the biblical exhortation to “love thy neighbor,” the orchard owners could remedy the ill effects of their poisonous fruit by allowing the kiss of true love between same sex couples at their facility, just as they do for heterosexual couples.

While we are anything but biblical scholars, the Christian tome’s familiar injunction “judge not, lest ye be judged” also comes to mind. It is here that the best nature of our secular and theistic spirits align, urging us to love one another without judgment. Would that the owners of the Country Mill embrace this truest expression of God’s will with a simple gesture of tolerance for their fellow humans.

As practicing Catholics, they could draw inspiration from Pope Francis himself, who regularly calls upon his flock to show love toward the LGBTQ+ community. “Tell me,” he once wrote, “when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person? We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”

It seems unlikely that the Country Mill owners will take heed of the pope’s admonition, so its lawsuit against the City of East Lansing alleging religious discrimination will continue to churn through the federal court system. We are not lawyers and won’t attempt to dissect the legal arguments on both sides, except to say that the case will likely turn on whether the city’s regulatory actions exhibited hostility toward the family’s religious beliefs rather than maintaining neutrality.

We prefer to reflect on the philosphical principles involved in the city’s fight to protect its ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, a practice the Country Mill owners freely admit, defending their ban on same sex marriages as an exercise in religious freedom.

Yet, as others have observed, freedom is a two-way street. It is ironic, not to mention antithetical to common sense, that the Country Mill owners demand the city accommodate its discriminatory religious beliefs, while attempting to deny the city the right to enact and enforce its secular beliefs in the form of policies that prohibit discrimination.

Astute libertarians would likely invoke the “harm principle,” as espoused by John Stuart Mill in his classic work “On Liberty.” “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will,” Mill argued, “is to prevent harm to others.” France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 takes a similar tack, proclaiming that “liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.”

Applying this precept to the present case, the right of the Country Mill owners to participate in a city-sponsored event, in violation of the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance, can be viewed as injuring the rights of East Lansing residents to live in a community free from discrimination. Which, we ask, is the greater harm? That a single small business is denied the opportunity to sell a few apples at a public market? Or that a local government is denied the opportunity to protect its many residents from the toxic (and illegal) fruit of overt discrimination? The answer, to us, is obvious.

Just as there is no legal mandate that couples seeking to tie the knot must patronize the Country Mill, neither does the Country Mill deserve a legal mandate to sell products at the East Lansing farmers market. In the end, we suggest the Country Mill owners keep their bigotry and intolerance to themselves and sell their poison apples elsewhere.

Send letters to the editor on this editorial or any other topic to letters@lansingcitypulse.com. Please limit them to 250 words.