By Timothy P. Carney
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
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 and men into participating in ceremonies that violate their
beliefs. 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 version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Left let loose
a cacophonous chorus of cries about a dangerous flood of homophobia spreading
out from the Hoosier state.
The misrepresentation would be laughable 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, unsated by its recent culture war victories,
trying now to conscript the defeated soldiers at gunpoint.
The Left's tirades against Indiana's RFRA rely largely on
paranoid predictions of what religious liberty might yield. RFRA "could be
used as a cudgel by corporations to justify discrimination," warns Judd
Legum 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 healthcare. 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 United States, 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.
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 is the terms of surrender the Right is
requesting in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the
cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriage, 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 a man, 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 its love of pluralism and tolerance — if that
ever was their goal.
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