On one side is the CEO of the world’s largest company, the President of the United States, and a growing chunk of the Fortune 500. On the other side is a solo wedding photographer in New Mexico, a 70-year-old grandma florist in Washington, and a few bakers.
One side wants the state to conscript the religious businesswomen into participating in ceremonies that undermine their conscience. The other side wants to make it possible for religious people to live their own lives according to their consciences.
Yet somehow, the Left and most of the mainstream press paint the current skirmishes over religious liberty as conservative offensives. When Indiana decided to follow the Clinton administration and 19 states in passing a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Left let loose a chorus of cacophonous cries about a dangerous flood of homophobia spreading out from the Hoosier state.
It would be a laughable misrepresentation if not for the awesome power wielded by the anti-religious freedom side.
Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple, the largest corporation in the world. He opposes religious freedom laws, and paints them as a growing scourge. “There’s something very dangerous happening in states across the country,” his Washington Post op-ed darkly began, warning of “A wave of legislation” to protect religious liberty.
This is hokum. Religious Freedom Restoration Acts have existed on the state and federal level for decades. What’s new here — the “wave” that’s actually sweeping over the country — is an emboldened and litigious cultural Left, left unsated by its recent culture war victories, trying now to conscript the defeated soldiers at gunpoint.
The Left’s tirades against Indiana’s RFRA mostly rely on paranoid predictions of what religious liberty might yield. RFRA “could be used as a cudgel by corporations to justify discrimination,” warns Judd Leggum at the liberal Think Progress. We heard these same terrified warnings amidst the Hobby Lobby case: Unless we force Christian employers to pay their workers in the form of contraception, we’ll soon have Exxon Mobil declaring itself as Christian Scientist in order to axe all health-care. Who knows, maybe Comcast will come out as Salafist and all female employees will have to don the hijab.
Slippery-slope arguments are often valid — but not coming from the cultural Left, about marriage in the U.S., in 2015.
After millennia of marriage being uncontroversially a union between one man and one woman, and after a decade of electorates in most states (and President Obama in 2008) upholding that traditional definition, the Left has used the courts to redefine the institution. People are fired for having taken the losing side. On college campuses, the current fights are about banning even the articulation of traditional views, and how exactly to change the English language so as to best accommodate transgendered students.
Amidst this culture-war dynamic, the Hobby Lobby decision and Indiana’s RFRA don’t represent any slide down a slope towards religiosity or individual liberty. Instead, our culture is speeding down the icy left slope of the cultural mountain, and a few conservatives are now dragging their hands on the ice to slow the acceleration — and the Left is crying that this will send us catapulting back uphill.
Religious liberty represents truce in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriages, your no-fault divorce, your obscene music and television, your indoctrinating public schools, and your abortion-on-demand. May we please be allowed to not participate in these?
But no. Tolerance isn’t the goal. Religious conservatives must atone for their heretical views with acts of contrition: Bake me a cake, photograph my wedding, pay for my abortion and my contraception.
In Georgia, a Catholic school employed a gay teacher. When he announced he was marrying, the school said this violated the expectations of public behavior they demand of their teachers. They fired him. Now the Obama administration is coming after the school.
Even in abortion, the Left is tired of long-observed truces. The Hyde Amendment, which for decades has restricted federal funding of abortion providers while never intruding on the freedom of women to abort their children, is no longer tolerated by the abortion lobby, which even killed a human trafficking bill over it.
As stunning as their ambitions of total victory is their continued pretense to be fighting a defensive war. It should be obvious to all that the Left long ago dropped their love of pluralism and tolerance — if that ever was their goal.
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