Religious liberty is being squashed in America at a frightening pace. The Supreme Court decision tyrannically and unconstitutionally imposing sodomy-based marriage on the entire country against the will of its citizens has only accelerated the trend to warp speed.
The problem of the shrinkage of religious liberty was bad enough before the Supreme Court meddled in it, and now religious liberty is on pace to vanish any place outside the four walls of a church building or a home. And it may not even be safe there.
Liberal pundit Sally Kohn, after attacking me, Todd Starnes, and Rod Dreher by name in a piece in the Daily Beast, expresses her fervent wishes for our complete marginalization.
“Will anti-gay Christians be politically and socially ostracized? I sure hope so.”
Social ostracism is one thing. This means not being invited to parties and social clubs and being snubbed by neighbors.
But political ostracism is another thing entirely. Political ostracism means being excluded from the political sphere. It means being excluded from participatory democracy. As I wrote last week, it means in time that Christians will be forbidden to hold public office, or serve in any public capacity, including fire chief (ask Kelvin Cochran of Atlanta all about that) or even school teacher.
Subscribing to pro-homosexual orthodoxy will become the new criterion for participating in society at large.
Readers are by now familiar with Aaron and Melissa Klein, who were fined $135,000 by a bureaucrat (no trial by jury, no judge, no right to confront accusers in open court, etc.) for politely declining to violate their own Christian conscience in the conduct of their business.
To add constitutional insult to constitutional injury, this bureaucrat slapped a gag order on the Kleins so they are not allowed even to talk to anybody about this travesty. Their right to the free exercise of religion, gone. Their right to free speech, gone. Their right to free association, gone.
In other words, this bureaucrat just issued a binding decree that the First Amendment applies to everybody in America except Christians. Christians, according to this man, have no First Amendment rights of any kind.
A baker in Colorado, Jack Phillips, is going to court today for similarly declining to use his expressive gifts to bake a cake which included a message of support for same-sex marriage. For his effrontery, having the nerve to actually believe the First Amendment applied to him, he too has been fined, ordered to bake cakes that violate his conscience, sent to re-education camp, and ordered to provide quarterly “compliance reports” to show that he is sufficiently servile to the lords of political correctness.
I have said from the very beginning of the debate about special rights based on sexual deviancy that it is a zero sum game. Every advance of the homosexual agenda has to come at the expense of religious liberty. Every time the homosexual cause advances, religious liberty is forced into retreat.
Religious liberty will only at last find refuge inside the four walls of church buildings, if it is even allowed there. Tax exempt status may soon be stripped from every church that will not toe the line, churches may be forced to host gay weddings, and pastors may be forced to conduct them.
Pastors that teach a biblical view of homosexuality from the pulpit may soon be brought up on hate speech and hate crimes charges. While you may think this is an exaggerated fear, it most certainly is not. It’s already happened in Sweden and has happened to street preachers in the UK. It’s only a matter of time before it happens here.
Jazz Shaw, a sodomy-based marriage supporter who writes for the supposedly conservative website Hot Air, is stunned at the rapidity with which religious liberty is vanishing in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. He did not see it coming, and now it’s too late.
“I don’t regret my long held position that the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage, but I admit yet again that I didn’t foresee how wide the litigants would push the door in the other direction if they prevailed in proving that it was...
“When two “rights” conflict in the eyes of the court, one of those sets of rights will have to give way. And the courts have shown repeatedly that they are generally willing to be a reflection of political winds of change rather than adherence to founding principles. The way the breeze is blowing today, if it comes down to a choice between that crusty old freedom of religion and the newly discovered right to marriage, the new broom sweeps clean. It’s a very ugly thing to watch unfolding before our eyes.”
Well, Mr. Shaw, we did see it coming. This what we warned you about from the beginning of this controversy.
The abominable new reality is that Christians have been stripped of every meaningful constitutional right under the First Amendment.
Bottom line: the Christian man has no rights which the liberal man is bound to respect. We are the new Dred Scott.
