…I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the founding fathers.
Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refuge — a
businessman who had escaped from Castro — and in the midst of his
story, one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know
how lucky we are!" And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are?! I had some place to escape to…"
And in that sentence, he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth…
Almost 50 years later,
Ronald Reagan's A Time for Choosing
warning of 1964 seems to have came to pass, its content unheeded by hundreds of thousands of citizens "taught" by state schools, and
Rod Drehere has the depressing details
(thanks to
Ed Driscoll):
No, the sky is not falling — not yet,
anyway — but with the Supreme Court ruling constitutionalizing same-sex
marriage, the ground under our feet has shifted tectonically.
It is hard to overstate the significance of the Obergefell
decision — and the seriousness of the challenges it presents to
orthodox Christians and other social conservatives. Voting Republican
and other failed culture war strategies are not going to save us now.
Discerning the meaning of the present
moment requires sobriety, precisely because its radicalism requires of
conservatives a realistic sense of how weak our position is in
post-Christian America.
The alarm that the four dissenting
justices sounded in their minority opinions is chilling. Chief Justice
John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia were particularly scathing in
pointing out the philosophical and historical groundlessness of the
majority’s opinion. Justice Scalia even called the decision “a threat to
democracy,” and denounced it, shockingly, in the language of
revolution.
It is now clear that for this Court,
extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice.
True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the
First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the fears of those worried about
religious liberty. But when a Supreme Court majority is willing to
invent rights out of nothing, it is impossible to have faith that the
First Amendment will offer any but the barest protection to religious
dissenters from gay rights orthodoxy.
Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice
Samuel Alito explicitly warned religious traditionalists that this
decision leaves them vulnerable. Alito warns that Obergefell
“will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new
orthodoxy,” and will be used to oppress the faithful “by those who are
determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”
The warning to conservatives from the four dissenters could hardly be clearer or stronger. So where does that leave us?
For one, we have to accept that we really are living in a culturally
post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been
able to depend on no longer exist. To be frank, the court majority may
impose on the rest of the nation a view widely shared by elites, but it
is also a view shared by a majority of Americans. There will be no
widespread popular resistance to Obergefell. This is the new normal.
For another, LGBT activists and their fellow travelers really will be
coming after social conservatives. The Supreme Court has now, in
constitutional doctrine, said that homosexuality is equivalent to race.
The next goal of activists will be a long-term campaign to remove
tax-exempt status from dissenting religious institutions. The more
immediate goal will be the shunning and persecution of dissenters within
civil society. After today, all religious conservatives are Brendan
Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla who was chased out of that company for
supporting California’s Proposition 8.
Third, the Court majority wrote that gays and lesbians do not want to
change the institution of marriage, but rather want to benefit from it.
This is hard to believe, given more recent writing from gay activists
like Dan Savage expressing a desire to loosen the strictures of monogamy
in all marriages. Besides, if marriage can be redefined according to
what we desire — that is, if there is no essential nature to marriage,
or to gender — then there are no boundaries on marriage. Marriage
inevitably loses its power.
In that sense, social and religious conservatives must recognize that the Obergefell
decision did not come from nowhere. It is the logical result of the
Sexual Revolution, which valorized erotic liberty. It has been widely
and correctly observed that heterosexuals began to devalue marriage long
before same-sex marriage became an issue. The individualism at the
heart of contemporary American culture is at the core of Obergefell — and at the core of modern American life.
This is profoundly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But this is the world we live in today.
One can certainly understand the joy that LGBT Americans and their
supporters feel today. But orthodox Christians must understand that
things are going to get much more difficult for us. We are going to have
to learn how to live as exiles in our own country. We are going to have
to learn how to live with at least a mild form of persecution. And we
are going to have to change the way we practice our faith and teach it
to our children, to build resilient communities.
It is time for what I call the Benedict Option. In his 1982 book After Virtue,
the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the current age to
the fall of ancient Rome. He pointed to Benedict of Nursia, a pious
young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray,
as an example for us.
…/… Last fall, I spoke with the prior of the Benedictine monastery in
Nursia, and told him about the Benedict Option. So many Christians, he
told me, have no clue how far things have decayed in our aggressively
secularizing world. The future for Christians will be within the
Benedict Option, the monk said, or it won’t be at all.
Obergefell is a sign of the times, for those with eyes to
see. This isn’t the view of wild-eyed prophets wearing animal skins and
shouting in the desert. It is the view of four Supreme Court justices,
in effect declaring from the bench the decline and fall of the
traditional American social, political, and legal order. …/…
