On Wednesday morning two men sat in the studio of P1 Morgen, the DR morning radio programme, and talked about what it means to be Danish. It is a conversation that is held every autumn, and it usually ends up somewhere around frikadeller, Danish meatballs, and club life, and whether Dannebrog is actually a bit racist to fly if at the same time you also happen to like that song with the young blonde girl.
This time it ended up somewhere else.
Mads Strange from Liberal Alliance had brought a different yardstick this year.
It went something like this -
Whoever does not support homosexuality all the way down is not Danish, and should not be able to become it either.
I let it lie until today. While I started thinking about who it hits.
Imagine a Catholic family from Iraq. They fled because they are Christians, and that costs in Iraq. They have come here, they work, the children go to school, they go to church on Sundays, and they believe what the Church has taught for two thousand years, that marriage is between a man and a woman.
They wish no one any harm. They have never laid a finger on anyone for living differently from them. And now a young politician sits on the radio saying they can forget all about belonging here, because they hold the wrong opinion deep down.
I am not sure he has thought that thought all the way through.
So let us look at what it actually is we are defending when we defend the freedom to be homosexual in Denmark.
It is something big, and it is something very, very new.
In 1933 - so not even a hundred years ago - it was decriminalised.
In 1989 we became the FIRST country in the WORLD where two men or two women could enter a registered partnership.
In 2012 - only 14 years ago - they could then be married in church.
It is a freedom and a right less than a hundred years old in a country that is over a thousand. Many of us can remember what it was like before both 2012 and 1989 - and that is one of the reasons it is worth defending without blinking.
But notice what it is.
It is a FREEDOM.
The freedom to live openly, to walk hand in hand and kiss down the street without being beaten up, to marry and inherit from each other and be left in peace.
Denmark can demand that everyone who lives here *respects* that.
That is something different from demanding that *everyone likes it*.
Because there is a limit to how far the law can reach into a human being, and it runs at Conscience.
Folketinget, the Danish parliament, can demand that you leave your neighbour alone. It can demand that you stand by a Denmark where he is protected, even when your faith says something else about his life. It CANNOT demand that you believe the same as him.
Because the moment the state starts asking what you think in your heart about other people's bedrooms - that is where it has begun wanting to own the inner man.
And that is, quietly, exactly the order we say we want to keep out.
Because that is what makes Islam's law incompatible with Denmark. Sharia does not distinguish between what the state can demand of you and what God places in you. It wants - or its architecture is written so - law and faith to be one.
A Danish party that wants Danes and new Danes to confess *the right opinion* on sexual morality in order to belong is making the same confusion, just with a different content.
And then we are standing where we would least like to stand, singing the same song - as sharia - just in a different language.
Is that what we want?
And now to the other half. It has to be said just as clearly.
The Muslim newcomers have come from countries where Islam's law has put homosexuality under punishment for 1,400 years. Most of the schools of law have set death as the punishment, and several countries still do today.
So it doesn't sit in the head as an opinion you can trade in at the counter in Kastrup or up with the KommuneDamen, the lady at the council office. It has been handed down through a hundred generations in the same family line, it is grandmothers and great-great-great-great-grandfathers and Friday prayers and everything a Human being is made of. It doesn't lie as an opinion on top of the Human being, it lies as a ground or a foundation underneath - and none of us trades that in because we got a new postcode.
Some people - that is, our politicians and Experts™ - thought it would pass by itself, if they just watched a bit of DR, got a job, tasted a cinnamon swirl and learned to enjoy the smell of bacon. But well... That expectation probably should have been thought through a bit better before the doors were opened.
They treated a faith that has shaped people for almost fifteen hundred years as a habit that disappears with prosperity, a course or a round of therapy - and on top of that they called it tolerance.
It was the opposite.
It was taking the other person's deepest faith so lightly that you couldn't even imagine it might mean anything.
Well, it does.
It does for us too.
That is why you yourself push back when someone says, for example, that theft should cost you a hand - or when others say that a woman can have a penis.
You don't just give up on what you believe about what you believe in.
But understanding how deep something sits is of course not the same as giving it room. You can take a faith completely seriously and at the same time say to it - not here!
In fact it is only when you take it seriously that you can say it, because then you know what you are saying no to.
And so. Whoever wants a society where it is forbidden to be homosexual, and where it is to be punished, does NOT belong in Denmark. NOT in Europe, and NOT in the understanding of Man and of Freedom that the West has fought its way to.
This is where the line runs, and it is sharp.
But feel where it runs. It does not run at what YOU think is right in God's eyes.
It runs at whether you will use the power of society AGAINST your neighbour to get YOUR way.
That is why Strange's yardstick sorts wrongly in both directions.
It turns away the honest Catholic who says - I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I will defend your right to live differently with everything I have. And it lets in the one who has learned to say the right words.
An opinion you can rehearse.
A life you cannot.
Ask about the opinion, and you get the best actor. Ask whether he will leave his neighbour in peace, and you get an answer that can be held up against how he actually lives.
So the right question is not whether you like homosexuality.
It is whether you will leave him alone.
A Christian can answer that honestly. A Jew can answer that honestly. A great many Muslims can answer that honestly. And those who cannot are exactly the ones who should be sorted out.
At the citizenship ceremony Denmark demands a handshake. Not a confession, not a creed, not a lie-detector text and not an opinion on other people's love. It demands a hand, held out as a sign that you step in under the same laws as everyone else and let your fellow citizens be FREE.
Denmark has always been able to settle for your hand.
That is why it was free.
Shouldn't we keep it that way?
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Friday, friends
