If you’re worried that the demise of religion implies the demise of morality, I suggest you search the term “Memories Pizza.” As it happens, Memories Pizza is (or was) a small business in the town of Walkerton, Indiana. By all accounts, its owners had never refused to serve gays, or uttered a harsh word about the gay community. Then, however, a reporter by the name of Alyssa Marino strolled in fishing for a story about Indiana’s recently enacted “Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” Apparently attracted by the signage in the restaurant that made it obvious that the owners were Christians, Marino asked the proprietor a question that had never come up in the decade the business had been in business, and was unlikely to come up in the future; Would the business cater a gay wedding. The reply: “If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no.” Marino promptly wrote a story about her visit under the headline, “RFRA: First Michiana business to publicly deny same-sex service.” This was a bit disingenuous, to say the least. As Robbie Soave at Hit and Run put it,
That headline implies two things that are false. The O’Connors had no intention of becoming the first Michiana business to do anything discriminatory with respect to gay people; they had merely answered a hypothetical question about what would happen if a gay couple asked them to cater a wedding. And the O’Connors had every intention of providing regular service to gay people—just not their weddings.
No matter, the story went viral, provoking a furious (and threatening) response from the gay ingroup. Hundreds of reviews suddenly appeared on Yelp, with comments such as,
I you like your pizza with a side of bigoted hatred and ignorance this is the spot for you. If you’re not a piece of trash I would stay away.
This is an excellent place to bring back that old time, nostalgia feeling. For those who want to experience what life was like under Jim Crow, this is the place for you!
Terrible place, owners chose to be heterosexual. The biggest bigots are the most closeted. No gay man or woman is going to order pizza for a wedding. These people should be put out of business. O yeah, I’m going to kill your Jesus. Try and stop me.
and, finally, the apocalyptic,
DO NOT EAT HERE – The owners are hateful bigots who twist the meaning of Christianity to satisfy their own insecurities by indoctrinating their children with hate, further poisoning our world and future generations.
…and no doubt our “precious bodily fluids” as well. These were topped off by death threats and calls for arson attacks, such as this tweet by high school coach Jess Dooley:
Who’s going to Walkerton, IN t0 burn down #memoriespizza w me?
Of course, all this was treated as a mere bagatelle by the mainstream media. After all, the owners were nothing but a couple of hinds in flyover country, and Christians to boot. If victims can’t be portrayed as leftist martyrs, what’s the point of protecting them? Regardless of which “side” you choose, the story certainly demonstrates an important truth, and for the umpteenth time: God or no God, morality isn’t going anywhere.
Whether you agree with the gay activists or not, it is abundantly clear that their responses are instances of moral behavior. Furthermore, they demonstrate the dual nature of human morality, characterized by radically different types of moral responses to others depending on whether they are perceived to belong to one’s ingroup or outgroup. They also clearly demonstrate the human tendency to interpret moral emotions as representations of objective things, commonly referred to as Good and Evil, which are imagined to exist independently of the subjective minds that give rise to them. In the minds of the gays, the attitude of the Memories Pizza folks towards gay marriage isn’t just an expression of one of many coequal cultural alternatives. It can’t be dismissed as a mere difference of opinion. It doesn’t reflect the interpretation of one of many possible moralities, all equally valid relative to each other. No, clearly, in the minds of the gays, the owners have violated THE moral law. Otherwise their response, as reflected in tweets, e-mails and threats, would be inexplicable.
What rational basis is there for this furious reaction? As far as I can tell, none. Certainly, the gays cannot rely on holy scripture to legitimize their outrage. In spite of whimsical attempts at Biblical exegesis by the gay community, both the Bible and the Quran are quite explicit and blunt in their condemnations of gay behavior. The compassionate and merciful God of the Quran even threatens those who ignore the prohibition with quintillions of years in hell experiencing what ISIS recently inflicted on a Jordanian pilot for a few seconds, and that just for starters. I find no other sanction, whether in religion or philosophy, for the conclusion that opposition to gay marriage is not only wrong, but is actually absolutely evil. In other words, the behavior of the gay activists is completely irrational. It is also completely normal.
The evolved behavioral traits that are the “root cause” of moral behavior exist because they happened to increase the odds that those who were “wired” for such traits would be more likely to survive and reproduce. Mother Nature saw to it that moral emotions would be powerful, experienced as reflections of absolutes, and perceived as the independently existing “things,” Good and Evil. She didn’t bother with anything other than the big picture, the gross effect. As a result she treated such ostensibly comical manifestations of morality as the raining down of pious anathemas on devout Christians, who tend to be relatively successful at reproduction, by gays, who normally don’t reproduce at all, with a grain of salt, confident (and rightly so) that the vast majority of humans would be too stupid to perceive their own absurdity.
In a word, fears that the demise of religion implies the demise of morality are overblown. It will continue to exist in its manifold “different but similar” manifestations, regardless of whether it enjoys the sanction of religious scripture or the scribbling of philosophers. Morality is hardly infinitely malleable, but it can be shaped to some extent. It would probably behoove us to do so, making it quite clear in the process to what sorts of behavior it does and does not apply. The list should be kept as short and simple as possible, consonant with keeping the interactions of individuals as harmonious and productive as possible.
Back in the day, the religious types whose tastes ran to foisting Prohibition on an unwilling nation used to promote the idea of “one morality.” It probably wasn’t such a bad idea in itself, although I personally would likely have taken exception to the particular flavor they had in mind. I would favor a “one morality” that was free of religious influence, and that would apply in situations that the long experience of our species has taught us will arouse moral emotions in any case. Beyond that, it would apply to as limited an additional subset of behaviors as possible. Finally, this “one morality” would make it crystal clear that subjecting any other forms of behavior to moral judgment is itself immoral.
There could be no ultimate sanction or source of legitimacy for such a “one morality” than there could be for any other kind, by virtue of the very nature of morality itself. However, if it were properly formulated, it would be experienced as an absolute, just like all the rest, regardless of all the fashionable blather about moral relativism. There would, of course, always be those who question why they “ought” to do one thing, and “ought not” to do another. As a society, we would do well to see to it that the answer is just what Mother Nature “intended”: You “ought” to do what is “right,” because you will find the consequences of doing what is “right” a great deal more agreeable than doing what is “wrong.”
