I've been meaning to write about this for some time, and I find that every time I start collecting my thoughts I discover that events have taken another step. It's dawning on more and more Christians that the movement for homosexual marriage and for approval of homosexuality in general means that the liberal culture is beginning to operate on that erstwhile Catholic motto that "error has no rights." 

James Hitchcock, writing in the March/April Touchstone, has an excellent succinct summary of the situation. The article is not available online, and my copy of the magazine is in my office at work, thirty miles away, so I can't quote him precisely, but he makes three key points. 

First is that liberalism, in the sense that we casually use the term, is a religion. This is neither classical liberalism, nor political liberalism insofar as specific opinions about, for instance, government spending, are concerned. It's a complete philosophy of life comprised of practical atheism (though with plenty of room for unstructured "spirituality"), left-wing politics, sexual liberation, and hostility toward the Western heritage, with particular animosity for Christianity. 

Second, that this religion is engaged in a struggle for dominance with traditional religions, most visibly with the strains of Christianity which still insist on the objective meaning of traditional beliefs, but also with similar strains in Judaism. (Islam is a special case: to be applauded and encouraged as an enemy of Christianity, but yet alarming, because so entirely un-liberal.)

And third, that this religion is less and less inclined to consider that its opponents have a right to express their views in public. 

The reasoning is based on the assertion that a negative view of homosexuality is exactly the same thing as racism, and that opposition to homosexual marriage is exactly the same thing as opposition to equal rights for black Americans. The gradual defeat of racism in law and in public opinion is the defining historical paradigm for liberalism--and almost every question is subsumed in it, with the side favored by liberalism naturally standing in the place of Martin Luther King et.al. and its opponents in the place of t he Ku Klux Klan. This very simplified good-vs.-evil schema is immensely powerful, not only among committed liberals themselves but among white Americans at large, who remain rightfully ashamed of the racism of the past and are at least defensive about taking the wrong side in any controversy which has been framed this way.

Examples of this are popping up all over the place. There was a good bit of noise a few months ago when a Washington Post reporter explicitly affirmed that he felt no more obligation to be fair to opponents of same-sex marriage than to be fair to open racists. This post on Rod Dreher's blog at The American Conservative gives a good summary of that affair, with links to more details. 

And if you read the comments on any post related to same-sex marriage at National Review's blog, you'll find, over and over again, liberals making exactly the same argument, though with more vigorous hostility, and an often-repeated happy anticipation of the day when those who disagree will be defeated and silenced. I imagine you can find many instances in the hundreds of comments on this post, for instance. It seems a Christian legal organization came into possession of a list of suggestions for IRS managers about dealing with homosexuals (et.al.). As the post notes, the suggestions clearly assume that disapproval of homosexuality (etc.) is not tolerable in the modern workplace. Some of them are simple matters of civility, but some go far beyond that in insisting on active agreement and suppression of disagreement. (Click here to go directly to the document.)

When you consider that the agency in question here is the one in charge of implementing tax policy and has enormous discretionary power to inflict punishment, and that it is currently in the news for plainly having used its powers to handicap conservative organizations, the picture of what is coming our way is pretty clear. I have been saying for many years that the pretense of secular democracies that government is completely neutral on fundamental philosophical questions is untenable and doomed. I'm now watching the pretense dissolve. Liberal culture is largely in control of the federal government, and we can expect it to push ever harder to disgrace and marginalize orthodox Christians and other dissenters, and to attack, where possible, the legal right to act or speak in opposition to the liberal consensus on homosexuality . Any Christian who doesn't see this and doesn't think it's significant has his head in the sand. That may not be a sin but it certainly isn't a virtue.