Jay Redhawk wrote:
“Only government is required to respect freedom of speech. Churches, businesses, and other public and private institutions do not have to put up with speech that is derogatory or destructive to their objectives. Her attitude reflects back toward the church, and the church is free to ask her and her husband to leave.”
What you have described is the first premise of ‘groupthink’! Enter church, and check your brain at the door. The pastor will tell you what is expected of you. Freedom of Speech is so a part of our American DNA, that the venerable Mountain Men had a saying:
“The right to swing your fist ends one inch from my nose.”
To enter a church, sit in a pew, not check out what the pastor tells you (which said action is told for you to do in the Pauline letters), and blindly accept his spoonful of a sermon, is ludicrous!
Sure, the two of them, (pastor/wife), are a nuclear unit. However, both the husband, and the wife, are still individual Americans, are they not? They BOTH still have a mind, do they not? or, in your ideas, does the wife ‘check her brain at the door’, and accept the spoonful, from her husband, the pastor? Do you believe that he should do the voting for elected offices and municipal referendums, for her, too?
Your being ridiculous. If I did not like what a pastor had to say I would find a different church. In this case the church did not care for what the pastor’s wife represented so the church asked them both to leave. The church has a right to do so for whatever reason it chooses.
Americans also have a right to freedom of expression. If a pastor’s wife decided to produce some blasphemous art, would a church be accepted to just simply accept that as her right of expression? What if the pastor’s wife posed for Swank magazine? She has a right to do so, but does the church have to simply accept that? Just like a business a church can fire someone for whatever reason it chooses.