There is a fable dating back to ancient times called If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. It tells the story of a psychotic rodent who barges into a young boy’s house and demands a delicious baked good. Once he’s devoured the treat, he demands some milk, then a straw, then a napkin, and before long he’s consumed everything in the house, including the house itself, and the poor boy dies alone in the cold. That’s how the story was told to me, anyway.
Keen political observers have noticed that the American Left is much like the domineering household pest in this tale. It is never finished eating. Make one compromise with it, and immediately it will want another. Concede any ground, and soon it will stake its claim on the ground to which you just retreated. Give it an inch and it will take your soul.
Conservatives were too slow to understand this reality, and too fearful to do anything about it once they came to understand it, so now the progressive march to forcibly eradicate opposing opinions is in full swing. It was not enough for progressivism to become the predominant ideology in our culture; it was not enough for it to commandeer the media, Hollywood, the educational system, government, and the corporate world; it was not enough for progressivism to, for all intents and purposes, win the argument. Now it must be the only argument.
On the matter of gay marriage, as I’ve laid out over the course of the last two chapters, progressives achieved historic power to enshrine and codify into law the fantastical “right to gay marriage.” More consequentially, they won the battle of public opinion. Their premise on this issue became the premise of our entire culture.
If liberalism were an ideological force determined to convert the masses through argument and activism, it would now consider itself victorious, and begin the less exciting task of maintaining and sustaining the “advances.” But liberalism, or progressivism, is exactly what it claims to be. It must keep moving. It must tear down walls it already tore down and vanquish enemies who’ve long since surrendered. Because it is not anchored in truth, it is not anchored at all. It cannot stay still and defend this New World it created, because it’s not the creation of something new that it’s interested in, but the destruction of something old. Progressivism is an ideology of anti’s. It hates everything that the old Christian civilization built, not because it believes it can build something better, but because it hates that anything was built at all.
For this reason, it cannot rest on its laurels and let the matter of marriage be. Its next project, which has been in motion for some time now, is to punish, censor, and criminalize the few holdouts in the “traditional marriage” camp. This ends, make no mistake, with shuttered churches and noncompliant pastors in prison. I’m not saying we’ll all be attending church services in the catacombs next week (I wouldn’t know where to find a suitable catacomb anyway), but we are not immune to the fate so many Christians in other nations have suffered.
Christian persecution is not something confined only to history books and Middle Eastern hellholes. Once we became a post-Christian society, it was inevitable that we’d become an anti-Christian society.
A CREEPING TYRANNY
We’ve already seen, since about 2012, a sharp escalation in the Left’s war on the First Amendment rights of Christians.
It started with the small private companies in, or tangentially connected to, the wedding industry. Like something out of a George Orwell acid trip, bakers and photographers and other merchants who might sometimes provide goods and services for wedding ceremonies found themselves forced by law to bake or take pictures or perform whatever other service for homosexuals. A few examples you might remember from over the past few years:
• A baker in Colorado was found guilty of human rights violations because he declined to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding. The baker, Jack Phillips, specifically targeted by this attention-seeking couple, initially declined to make a cake for the gay wedding because he had deep and profound religious objections to the ceremony. This left the gay couple with two options: (1) Go, like, find any other baker in the area. (2) Try to legally force the man to bake the cake, because, you know, freedom.
Of course, as usual, they went with option two. And, as in every similar case across the country, the offending businessman made clear that he was perfectly willing to serve homosexuals—he just couldn’t lend his services to an activity he finds morally objectionable.
But it didn’t matter. His case made it all the way to the Colorado Court of Appeals, where the findings of a state commission were upheld. CNN reported that in 2014 the Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that “Phillips must create cakes for same-sex celebrations, re-train his staff, and file quarterly reports for two years to confirm the bakery wasn’t turning away customers because they were gay or lesbian.”
• A florist in Washington State faced penalties for not providing flowers for a gay wedding. The Christian grandmother was fined $1,000 and ordered to pay the legal fees of the gay couple whose human rights she violated by not providing the lilies and roses they demanded. She was instructed to work gay weddings in the future, making her and the other businesspeople in her boat into glorified indentured servants.
• The New Mexico Supreme Court found that a small photography company in the state is not allowed to decide which weddings it will photograph and which weddings it won’t photograph. The court compelled the Christian photographers who own the business to work gay weddings, despite their religious convictions.
This ruling came after the owner, Elaine Huguenin, politely declined to photograph a lesbian wedding back in 2006. As Huguenin explained: they will “gladly serve gays and lesbians—by, for example, providing them with portrait photography—whenever doing so would not require them to create expression conveying messages that conflict with their religious beliefs.”
But this wasn’t good enough. Even though the lesbian customers promptly found a different photographer who charged better rates, they still took the matter to the courts.
• A bakery in Oregon was fined over $135,000 for not servicing a gay wedding. The labor commissioner awarded the damages to a lesbian couple who claim they were emotionally devastated and distraught when they were forced to go to one of the dozens of other bakeries or grocery stores within a few-mile radius.
• A Catholic company in Albany, New York, was charged with civil rights violations when it refused to host a gay wedding on its farm. The company was forced to pay $10,000 to the state, and another $3,000 to help heal the “mental pain and suffering” it inflicted on the aggrieved lesbians.
• A T-shirt company in Kentucky found itself embroiled in a legal battle for committing the crime of refusing to make T-shirts for a gay pride parade in Lexington. The owner, again, referred the parade organizers to other T-shirt companies that offer the same service for the same price. But, again, that wasn’t good enough. The owner was charged with human rights violations, as the case bounced around to different courts, eventually getting tossed out on appeal. All of this because a guy didn’t want to make T-shirts.
And, though not instances of governmental intrusions, gay fascists have, in their single-minded pursuit of ideological conformity, also set their sights on Catholic priests who follow Church law; fast-food restaurants whose owners haven’t pledged allegiance to their cause; Christian hosts on HGTV who talk about the Bible sometimes; football commentators who don’t properly worship at the altar of a gay defensive end from Missouri; reality stars who talk about the Bible sometimes; tech CEOs who donate to legislation protecting traditional marriage; and many, many others.
In all of these cases, offenders have been threatened, blackmailed, bullied, boycotted, fired, or legally punished for, in the minds of the gay mob, “discriminating.”
FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE
In each of these cases, not a single gay person was singled out, victimized, persecuted, or otherwise preyed upon for being gay. The bakers and bridal shop owners and florists and T-shirt companies and photographers never once “refused service to gay people.” They refused to participate in activities involving gay people, but they never said, “You are gay so you may not purchase a cupcake in my establishment.” Why would they do that, anyway? The act of serving a delicious pastry to a homosexual is not, by any Christian teaching I’ve ever heard, intrinsically immoral. Nobody is refusing service to gays just because they’re gay. That’s not the point. That’s not what’s happening.
We are only talking about people who, for religious reasons, opted not to play an active role in a gay wedding ceremony or gay pride festival. And, on the other side of that coin, we’re talking about gays who wish to force private individuals to play that role, whether they like it or not.
The irony, of course, is that the effort to punish businesses who’d rather not associate with a gay wedding undermines one of the central arguments used to legally justify the gay wedding in the first place. After all, if a man has the right to choose whom he marries, a business owner surely must have the right to choose whom he serves.
A gay wedding is, supposedly, a victory for freedom of association. Yet gay activists see no problem with forcing Christians to associate with it. Freedom of association is not a terribly strong argument for gay marriage, but it is the strongest argument. Really, it’s the only argument. “Let us associate with each other however we want. We are consenting adults.”
I don’t think consent should be the single criterion for making something legal, as if everything is OK so long as all the people involved in it want to be involved in it, but if that is your position, there is no possible way to exclude the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker from that principle. Until rabid Christians show up uninvited to gay weddings to see to it that nobody provides cakes and photography, they cannot be said to be depriving homosexuals of anything. They are merely choosing not to associate themselves with the event. They are choosing not to consent.
Be that as it may, it’s now clear that some people have freedom of association and some don’t, just as some have freedom of religion and, with each passing year, more and more don’t. It should have been obvious when they first came after the bakers and photographers that the churches and religious organizations would be next.
A LOGICAL CONCLUSION
If the government can force a caterer to cater a gay wedding, and a photographer to photograph a gay wedding, and a baker to bake for a gay wedding, why can’t it force a church to conduct a gay wedding? Why, precisely? Because the church is a “religious institution”? So what? Where is it written that only religious institutions have a right to religious expression? I know where that distinction certainly isn’t made: the Constitution. If a photographer does not have the freedom to express his religious beliefs on the job, why should he have it just because he walks into a church? If bakers, and photographers, and T-shirt printers can be compelled to abandon their opposition to gay marriage, why can’t pastors?
But when we lost the argument against gay marriage, we lost the argument for our own religious liberty. The two happened at once, as we are beginning to see. Indeed, as liberals breathlessly argued, a church should not be allowed to keep slaves chained to the radiators in the basement just because some bizarre sect believes that slavery is divinely prescribed. Moreover, a pastor in this fictional denomination should not be allowed to rile his congregants into a frenzy and command them to go out and take slaves of their own. You cannot commit human rights violations, no matter your religion, and you cannot intentionally provoke others to do the same.
I agree with this sentiment. Religion cannot be used as a cover for atrocities, and it cannot be used as a vehicle to actively entice others into committing atrocities. A pastor may find the new Seth Rogen film objectionable (who doesn’t?), but he can’t call on his flock to burn their local theater to the ground and take Rogen hostage until he promises to stop producing movies (which would be a favorable outcome, although achieved through questionable means).
The only real question, then, is whether gay marriage actually is a human right. The answer to that question is no, of course, but anyone who answers yes must logically believe, or will soon logically believe, that any attempts by anyone to infringe on this right should be prevented and punished.
The groundwork has clearly been laid for a move against churches and other explicitly religious organizations. Really, it had already been set before that by the Obamacare contraception mandate, which, though not related to gay marriage, empowered the government to force private companies, Christian schools, and even nuns to pay for birth control pills and abortifacients. Different parts of the mandate were challenged and struck down by the courts, but the precedent had been set: your beliefs will not be respected if they are not consistent with the mainstream wisdom of the age.
In 2016, finally, the move to impose tolerance of gay marriage on the churches and the religious community began in earnest. Early in the year, a religious liberty bill passed through Georgia’s house and senate aroused the ire of the entire country, prompting the courageous governor, Nathan Deal, to veto the legislation. Caving to intense pressure from Disney, Time Warner, Starz, the Weinstein Company, AMC, Viacom, Marvel, CBS, MGM, NBC, the NFL, Coca-Cola, Apple, and many other companies, Deal tossed the bill into the garbage on the grounds that it was discriminatory against gays.
Despite this inordinate reaction, the horrific bill they were all so angry about would have simply accomplished the following:
• Protect a pastor from being forced to perform a gay wedding against his will.
• Protect religious organizations from being forced to host gay weddings against their will.
• Protect religious organizations from being forced to hire someone who opposes their fundamental tenets, beliefs, and goals.
Liberals opposed granting very basic religious protections to religious organizations. It was only a few months prior to the Georgia controversy that leftists were still insisting that only religious organizations should have religious rights. When the country debated a similar law in Indiana or any of those various cases involving bakers and photographers and so on, liberals said over and over again that if the companies in question were conspicuously and officially “religious,” they wouldn’t have a problem with gays being “discriminated against” on religious grounds.
There is no coherent constitutional argument you could make against a bill that protects the right of a religious group to be a religious group, unless the religious group is essentially reclassified as a hate group, which is the ultimate goal. In no universe would it make sense to claim that a man has a right to use the facilities of, or be employed by, an organization whose fundamental tenets he actively opposes and defies, unless his being gay endows him with that special and extraordinary right, which is the argument liberals have already successfully made and had codified by the Supreme Court.
THE RIGHT TO DISCRIMINATE
To make this broadly a matter of “discrimination” is absurd. If a church, Christian school, or pastor does have the constitutional right to the free exercise of religion, then they must have the right to discriminate. Exercising your religion means abiding by the moral doctrines of your religion, and a moral doctrine by its very nature excludes and discriminates against activities it deems immoral. So the right to the free exercise of religion, if it exists at all, does absolutely guarantee “the right to discriminate.” If it does not, then there is no freedom of religion. And, if you’re keeping up, you know that’s the whole point: there is no longer true freedom of religion in America. Not anymore.
Discriminate: “to make a distinction in favor of or against a person or thing on the basis of the group, class, or category to which the person or thing belongs”; “show partiality”; “to note or observe a difference”; “to distinguish”; “to differentiate.”
When you choose not to partake in a gay wedding, you are making a distinction against it based on the category to which it belongs. You are showing partiality. You are observing a difference. You are distinguishing. You are differentiating. You are discriminating. And so what?
There is no universal right to not be discriminated against. I realize that we have invented this right, but it does not actually exist as a constitutional or moral reality. To say that we have the right to be free from discrimination is to say that no individual can ever make a distinction in favor of or against us or our actions based on group, class, or category. This is ludicrous on its face. We all engage in this sort of discrimination on a daily basis. We all decide whom to associate with, and in what manner, and to what degree, and in what form, based on, yes, discrimination. Whether positive or negative, critical or complimentary, we discriminate—make distinctions, decide for or against—all the time. It’s part of being human.
If your daughter comes home with her bedraggled sixty-eight-year-old serial sex offender boyfriend and you react somewhat suspiciously to this arrangement, you have discriminated. If a man wearing a ski mask and toting a chain saw shows up to your door at 3:00 a.m. and asks to borrow a cup of sugar, you have discriminated if you shut the door in a hurry and call the cops. If you chose to wear a blue shirt today rather than a brown shirt, you discriminated. If you made a choice between one thing and another, if you drew conclusions based on available evidence, if you rejected anyone or anything for any reason, you discriminated.
How could an individual possess the absolute right to be free from distinctions and differentiations? What does that mean? Where does this right come from? Certainly not God, seeing as how He bestowed on us the mental facilities to discern, which is another synonym for discriminate.
Certainly not from the law, given that the law is the Constitution, and the Constitution specifically protects the right to discriminate in the very first amendment to the Bill of Rights. So this is a “right” rooted in nothing more than the whims of pandering politicians. Now, we certainly have the right to be free from unfair or prejudicial treatment by the government. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. These photography businesses and wedding venues aren’t run by the State; they’re run by people, and those people do all sorts of discerning over whom they do business with and the manner in which they do it. It would be rather impossible to run any sort of successful enterprise otherwise.
Let’s look at this another way. The right to discriminate—that is, the right of a private individual to make decisions in favor of or against another individual or activity—is an active right. It protects my ability to do and say things. It protects, or it is supposed to protect, my power to exercise agency over myself, my property, and my business. That is the nature of a human right, and human rights are elemental principles that speak to our inherent dignity and worth as rational beings. That’s why the Declaration of Independence outlines “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” proposing that all people should be granted these things, because we are entitled to them by the very nature of our humanity.
I can see, then, how agency over my property and my business can be called a human right. Without that agency, I am deprived of that which makes me human. This all makes sense. It’s coherent. It’s consistent. It might, in practice, lead to hurt feelings and—horror of horrors—it might force a gay person to Google for another of the twelve thousand bridal shops in her geographic vicinity, but the fact that it poses a possible inconvenience to another person does not undo the right itself.
So how does the right to not be discriminated against factor in? When the T-shirt company or wedding venue or photographer or baker or candlestick-maker declines to do business with us, which of our human rights have been infringed on? The right to access baked goods? What’s the underlying liberty we’re trying to protect? When someone murders you, they haven’t infringed on your right to not be murdered; they’ve infringed on your underlying right to life. What, then, is the liberty at the foundation in this case? The right to a product or service made or provided by another person? Well, if we have that right, when does it develop and where does it end? Are we all suddenly bequeathed with the inalienable right to affordable wedding photography the moment Susie Q down the street decides to open her own freelance business? Do we have this right even before she opens? Is she compelled by some mysterious cosmic force to become a photographer so as to fulfill society’s entitlement to her photography services?
And if we have a right to the photography, how can she even justify charging for it?
Does she own her business or not? If we are entitled to it, I suppose she doesn’t. Should she run all of her business decisions by us? How does that work? Should she hire Gallup and conduct a national poll of some sort? Certainly it goes without saying that if you ask her to come snap a few pics at your next orgy or Klan meeting, she must absolutely oblige. To refuse would be, by every definition, discrimination, and that would infringe on your right to not be discriminated against.
The people who want to legally prevent religions from “discriminating” against homosexuals really want to destroy Christianity. As I’ve demonstrated, their stance cannot be based on a general opposition to all forms of discrimination. If they actually believe that gay marriage is a human right, then their only recourse is to rid the nation of the Christian scourge.
When it comes down to it, they do not believe that certain religions, in their current forms, should be given safe harbor anywhere within our borders. They could pretend otherwise back when they were “only” trying to strip rights from private, secular companies, but now that they’re passionately opposing the rights of religious groups to abide by their own religions, the charade is over. They want to abolish Christianity and the only real question left is how, exactly, they plan to do it.
I didn’t quite expect our culture to make the transition from “only religious groups can be religious” to “every church must have its religious beliefs sanctioned by the government” so quickly, but I knew it was inevitable. This is why you cannot compromise with leftists or cede your position based on their arguments. They do not want to come to an understanding—they want obedience. That’s all they will accept. Make one concession and they’ll demand another, and another, and another, unto infinity. If you let up on the rightness of your fundamental position—in this case, that homosexuality is a perversion and gay marriage is an abomination—then you’ll quickly discover that you’ve let up on your right to hold that position.
I suspect the next step will be the revocation of tax-exempt status for religious entities that do not amend their doctrines to make sodomy and same-sex “marriage” morally righteous. Churches and religious organizations who do not strike Romans 1:26–28, Jude 1:5–8, 1 Timothy 1:8–11, Mark 10:6–9, 1 Corinthians 7:2, and many other passages from the Bible will be subject to financial and tax penalties that will cripple most of them.
Once that is complete, the full, Roman-style persecution will begin in earnest. If there will be any silver lining when that day arrives, it will be final separation of the wheat from the chaff. I suspect we’ll discover quite a lot of chaff. But the few Christians who remain steadfast in their faith, even as it is outlawed and its adherents subjected to all manner of indignities, can at least look around at one another and know they are finally in the company of true believers.