White Magazine Goes Into the Red

Well that didn’t take long.

Back at the end of August, I wrote about how wedding magazine White was facing a blackban over its quiet stance on same sex weddings, namely that it didn’t promote them.

Owners Luke and Carla Burrell are Christians who, while not making a noise about it, were holding to their conscience on what has become the precipitous issue in Australian culture.

But as The Australian reports today, that wasn’t good enough for the rainbow crowd, which started a shutdown campaign against White magazine, all of which began with calls for boycotts and ended with threats of house-burnings.

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

And when culture screams or shouts loud enough, things have to happen.  In the case of White magazine, there will be a screaming match, masquerading as a call for transparency, and no amount of politicking or freedom of conscience will matter.  They will have to be outed.  Have to be exposed. Have to be brought down.

Have to be brought down.

And they were.  And just as with everything that has happened in this glittery rainbow year since November 15 2017, it has happened quicker than most imagined.  And that it has happened at all is still a shock to some of those nice people who thought “why not change the definition of marriage, after all it’s only a little thing.”

Well, from little things, big things grow.  And sometimes those big things turn out to be monsters.

The Australian reports:

The founders of White magazine, Christians Luke and Carla Burrell, said they were the targets of an activist campaign that deterred their advertisers, frightened their staff and included threats of physical harm because of their stand on same-sex weddings.

But love is love, right?

Meanwhile here in good old Western Australia, photographer Jason Tey took on a photo shoot of the child of a same sex couple, but disclosed a conflict of belief, in case they wanted to hire someone else.

So he still agreed to do the photo shoot, right.  But what was the response? He was taken to this state’s Equal Opportunity Commission.  Here was what was demanded on him according to the newspaper:

At the conciliation hearing, it was demanded that Mr Tey provide an admission of discrimination as well as a written apology to be published publicly on the homepage of his website and all social media pages associated with his photography business for at least two months.

Say what? Maybe he should be put in stocks in Perth’s Hay Street Mall and be pelted with rotten fruit for being the obvious sinner he is.

His obvious refusal to be put under that sort of ridiculous pressure and go against his conscience means that the case is now off the State Administrative Tribunal. Don’t hold your breath.

Now of course you can argue in the case of White magazine it’s simply the market adjusting to the new reality.

Rubbish.  It’s the market running for cover when rainbow activists threaten would-be-advertisers with harassment and boycotts if they simply go about their business by advertising with White.  That’s what happened.  It was not about the market correcting itself, it was about harassment and activism.  It’s like the union thugs outside a building site yelling “scab!”

But that’s what a free market can do.  I’ve always said that when the Sexular Culture marches through the institutions it will simply mean that many roles that were once open to those who held to different views would find those roles shut to them.  It will start with frontline roles, such as wedding goods and services, and will percolate down to others over time.

All this proves is that activism can hasten the pace of change.  And of course, that’s how activists work in the permanent revolution. Activists will be celebrating the closure of White magazine, chalking it up for a win, and looking for the next target.

What’s slightly more sinister is the hashtag campaign in the wake of it from those within the wedding industry who called out White for their unstated position.

#UnveilYourValues is the new call out from the rainbow crowd.  And of course, if you don’t we’ll hunt you down and expose you for the recalcitrants you are.  Perhaps there should be a counter hashtag campaign #UnveilYourMotives.

The market will find you out.  That’s the way the market work.

But it’s not just the market. in other areas, we’re witnessing the government’s inability to sit back and examine the issues of religious freedoms and conscience issues on a wider level, and come to well considered decisions.

In fact, as The Australian reports the Attorney-General Christian Porter is taking a proposal for a religious discrimination act to cabinet for approval for the furore surrounding religious freedom in schools, but it pretty much clear it’s not going to pass muster in parliament.

No doubt schools will be targeted by a similar #UnveilYourValues next, and no amount of fudging or silence will be good enough.

It all sounds a challenge.  And quite sobering.  But as a friend asked just this morning:

How can we be simultaneously courageous, wise and faithful in this new normal?”

It is the new normal.  The old normal is not coming back, just as it did not come back for Daniel in Babylon.  But as Christians we have been equipped by the Spirit of God to be all of those things my friend said, and more.

Without courage we’ll cave in to the hashtag threats.  Without wisdom we’ll get angry and flail around.  Without faithfulness we’ll die the death of a thousand cuts over time, appeasing a movement that is essentially unappeasable.