There's nothing so pathetic as a Christian who thinks his religion is becoming a pariah here in the United States. Fox News has made a journalistic career out of this, conjuring up absurdities like the War on Christmas.
The plain fact is that this country is one of the most religious, and it is dominated by Christianity. There's no evidence that Christians are at risk of losing their super-majority status.
Which makes this piece on Time.com by Rod Dreher, "Orthodox Christians Must Now Learn to Live as Exiles in Our Own Country," so absurd I thought at first that the title must be a joke. Sure sounded like something The Onion would come up with.
Recent Onion posting: Nation's Homophobic Bigots Pack It In. Sadly, it's a satire, as proven by Dreher's essay. I've copied Dreher's piece in below. My caustic annotations are in purple.
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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.
For the better. Very much for the better. If Christians had been standing on solid moral ground, you wouldn't be feeling so shaky now that same-sex marriage is legal everywhere in the United States.
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.
Thank Tao. My non-prayers have been answered, albeit by nobody.
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.
Sobriety? Wrong choice. I recommend coming to Oregon and getting super-stoned. Marijuana is legal here day after tomorrow. It still isn't being sold, but if you went out on the streets of Portland and yelled, "I'm a sad bigoted homophobic Christian and I need some weed to make me feel better," I bet you'd be showered with quality pot.
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.
If Scalia hates a Supreme Court decision, this is a sure sign that it is on sound legal ground. Love and marriage are fundamental rights for everybody in a just society.
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.
First, marriage -- gay or straight -- isn't about sex. Anybody who has been married for a long time understands this. It is mostly about love. How many hours a month do married people have sex, compared to doing other things? Even if a couple acts like nympho-bunnies, its a small percentage.
Second, this supposed "gay rights orthodoxy" is simply homosexuals wanting the same rights as heterosexuals. If they were only concerned about getting on board the Sexual Revolution Train, why would they be so concerned about being able to marry their loved one? Many religions consider marriage to be a sacrament. Shouldn't Christians be pleased that gays want to embrace marriage?
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.”
Ridiculous. Nobody will be forced to marry a person of their own sex. The only "oppression" will be the same requirement for everybody in this country: obey the laws, or face the consequences. Religious belief doesn't entitle someone to be exempted from obeying laws. (At least, it shouldn't.) If it did, every person stopped for drunk driving could whip out his or her Church of Godly Alcoholism card and demand to be allowed to keep on weaving down the road.
The warning to conservatives from the four dissenters could hardly be clearer or stronger. So where does that leave us?
Um, let's see... going along with both a legal and cultural consensus that homosexuals should have the same rights as heterosexuals. Or is this too obvious and sensible an answer?
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.
I only wish. Unfortunately, this is still very much a Christian nation. But it's true: the times are a'changing. For the better.
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.
Wow! Finally, a bow to reality in this essay. Thank you for admitting that homophobic bigotry isn't a value shared by most Americans -- just some fundamentalist Christians.
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.
News flash: lots of people have been coming after social conservatives for a long time. Me, for example. And most liberals I know. LGBT activists, I'm pretty sure, have other things to do with their lives than devoting themselves to taking away the tax-exempt status of gay-bashing religious groups. Though this isn't a bad idea, now that you've mentioned it.
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.
Absurd argument. You forgot to mention that soon there will be efforts to extend marriage to human-animal partnerships. At least, this is what I hear on conservative talk radio. Saying that because two same-sex people can marry, along with two opposite-sex people, this will lead to "no boundaries on marriage" is ridiculous. However, it is true that there is no essential nature to marriage. It is whatever cultures decide it is.
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.
Again, if all gays cared about was sex, sex, sex, they wouldn't be pressing so hard for the right to marry. I speak as a man who has been married for 43 of my 66 years. As the old saying goes, "First comes love. Then comes marriage. Then comes the baby in the baby carriage." Sex is incidental in this common marital trajectory.
This is profoundly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But this is the world we live in today.
Yay!
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.
Give me a fucking break. In 1970 I became a strict vegetarian. I also embraced the teachings of an Indian guru. Now I'm an atheist. Any Christian who feels like an "exile in our own country" should realize that you guys are the freaking VAST MAJORITY of Americans, and that most people share your basic outlook on the cosmos. Atheists, adherents of Eastern religions, and many other sorts of minorities are WAY more stigmatized than Christians. Get over your self-pity.
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. We who want to live by the traditional virtues, MacIntyre said, have to pioneer new ways of doing so in community. We await, he said “a new — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”
Going to the woods to pray sounds like a great idea to me. I wish every Christian would do this. And never come out of the woods. This would make life a lot less crowded for us atheists. Can I have your house and car?
Throughout the early Middle Ages, Benedict’s communities formed monasteries, and kept the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness. Eventually, the Benedictine monks helped refound civilization.
After Christians kept Europe stuck in the Dark Ages for a long time, like, ages.
I believe that orthodox Christians today are called to be those new and very different St. Benedicts. How do we take the Benedict Option, and build resilient communities within our condition of internal exile, and under increasingly hostile conditions? I don’t know. But we had better figure this out together, and soon, while there is time.
Oh, poor Christians. You are by far the dominant religion in this country, yet you view any criticism of your unreasonable dogmatic beliefs as "hostile conditions." You're so used to having everything go your way, you feel like exiles because many Americans are starting to question aspects of your bigotry. Deal with it. Life changes. Society changes.
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.
Great. Head to your monasteries. Preserve your supposedly Undecayed Morality within those walls. I'd be overjoyed to see you do this. Because then you wouldn't be spouting your B.S. in public.
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.
Gee, you talk as if this is a bad thing. I relish in the decline and fall of traditional order.
We live in interesting times.
Ah, on this we agree.
Ah, the Supreme Court judgment!
We’ve discussed this no end (I have, I mean to say, offline) and there are two aspects of this that I haven’t found satisfactory answers to.
One : No matter the actual issue, and one’s position on the issue (mine’s pro-judgment, incidentally, as is yours, and as should be every right-thinking person’s), but the manner in which it was brought about is distinctly dicey. Wholly undemocratic.
There’s something unsavory about a people having something shoved down their throats, even if it is something wholly benignant, such as abolition of slavery, or same-sex marriage, or abolition of religion. That’s dictatorial, with all the attendant potential for disaster (even while, in theory at least, the benevolent dictatorship remains the ideal form of government -- always provided it continues to be seen as benevolent by the subjects).
And Two : I find this whole fixation with Christianity very very curious. Because very many of those who swear by Christianity are also parochial and insular, even borderline xenophobic. Indeed, their religion is often an extension of those very traits (parochialism and insularity). Do these people really realize the dude they’re praying to is basically a brown-skinned dude from the Asiatic Middle East?
This is so weird, this This-Is-How-We-Are line of thinking amongst Christians in the US. I think if someone ran a protracted campaign emphasizing how ALIEN, how decidedly non-American and non-European, how brown (sorry if that sounds racist, but I only mean to highlight the differences in my argument here, and race happens to be one of the outstanding differences), this dude, this Jesus Christ was (if at all he ever was, that is), then that itself would, if dinned repeatedly into people’s skulls, perhaps turn off very many of these fundamentalist types. Or, of course, not : fundamentalism does work in mysterious ways. Still, might be worth trying?
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | June 30, 2015 at 07:37 AM
Let's require everyone whining about the unelected justices making law post all their complaints about Citizens United and Hobby Lobby and Bush v Gore, all cases where the reactionary wing nut majority radically imposed their partisan preferences with no constitutional basis and cost the court its legitimacy.
The only thing with same sex marriage is that Kennedy just doesn't hate enough; sure he's a corporate tool, perfectly happy to sell out real people to put corporations in charge, but when it comes to same sex marriage, the dominant corporations are all for it, so Kennedy was allowed to vote however he wanted, and he still possesses a small measure of humanity, unlike the loathesome four, Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas.
Posted by: Walker | June 30, 2015 at 11:10 AM
Hilarious, Brian. Great post.
Posted by: TonyM | July 02, 2015 at 06:00 PM
There’s something unsavory about a people having something shoved down their throats, even if it is something wholly benignant, such as abolition of slavery, or same-sex marriage, or abolition of religion.
The only people who feel same-sex marriage is being "shoved down their throats" are homophobes who can't stomach the prospect of losing their right to discriminate against a particular class of people. Racists felt similarly force-fed by the repeal of segregation.
The only supreme court decision I'm choking on is Citizens United v F.E.C. Clearly, homosexuals and people of color are as human as those who would discriminate against them, but a corporation is not a person.
Posted by: x | July 03, 2015 at 11:10 AM
Quote x :
The only people who feel same-sex marriage is being "shoved down their throats" are homophobes who can't stomach the prospect of losing their right to discriminate against a particular class of people.
No, x, afraid I don't agree. (Naturally, as I'd then be agreeing to being labeled a homophobe as well as racist, and I don't believe I am either.)
I was talking about the principle of democracy (as so many others have gassed on about when talking about this topic), which, for all its flaws, is nevertheless the best system of arriving at laws and systems that our species has come up with.
We've also come up with totalitarian systems, and sometimes such systems can far outperform democracy over short spurts (and sometimes somewhat longer spurts) -- across factors like efficiency, justice, equality, everything -- but always, always, those spurts end after a while.
When you have one small group of people enforcing their values on a much larger group of people, then even thought the specific values may be unquestionably benignant, questions still remain. Simply because whether something is "unquestionably" benignant or not depends squarely on who it is who's doing (or not doing) the questioning. I'm sure many would like to be empowered to pass laws that prohibit all kinds of stuff, like religion, like committing slow suicide by smoking cancer sticks, like ... well, like anything at all, but if the imposition of such laws is not democratically done, if it does not have the explicit backing of the majority of the people it governs, then surely the danger lurking there is obvious? What if tomorrow some other small group found themselves able to impose a (to them) obviously benignant law that ensures that one is very actively discouraged from harming their (and others') souls by blaspheming?
The principle of the thing, that was my point. I'm personally all four same-sex marriages myself.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | July 06, 2015 at 04:24 AM
Appreciative Reader, your comments that what the United States Supreme Court did in making same-sex marriage legal everywhere in this country is a "dictatorial" act would strike most Americans as strange.
Our Constitution, of course, sets up the Court as a co-eqiual branch of government along with the Executive and Legislative. Countries have to be governed in some way. The Constitution isn't perfect, but it works pretty well.
Without a Supreme Court to interpret and rule on the constitutionality of laws, the danger of being ruled by an over-zealous majority that controls the legislative and executive branches would be very high. I don't believe rights are given by God. They are enumerated in the Constitution though.
One of this country's strengths is how citizens generally accept rulings of the Supreme Court even if they don't like them. The Court installed George Bush as President on a 5-4 vote. Liberals like me were outraged. We didn't revolt though. Likewise, most conservatives will accept the same-sex marriage ruling.
Yes, we still have a Tyranny of the Majority in many ways. That is inherent in democracies. However, without a Supreme Court this tyranny would be much more dangerous. Usually the Court is sensitive to changing public sentiments. This is the case with same-sex marriage, which most people have come to approve.
But in conservative states, it would have taken a long time for attitudes to change. Gays in those states would have been denied their right to marry, while most of the country moved on to a more enlightened attitude. So the Court did the correct thing -- recognizing a Constitutional right that can't be taken away.
Posted by: Brian Hines | July 06, 2015 at 07:23 AM
I suppose the correct approach to this issue would be to actually read the judgment, and then to actually check out the relevant portions of the US Constitution, and only then get down to forming (and expressing) one’s own opinion on this issue. Anything else would be simply lazy. And I’m afraid I’ve been guilty of exactly this : of forming opinions (and talking of them) without first ensuring that those opinions are actually built on facts.
I was assuming that the SC judgment impinges on the law-making function of the Executive (borderline-impinges, that is : blatant impinging on the Executive’s function would, I’m sure, be neither attempted, nor, if attempted, allowed to pass unchallenged). If I’m wrong in making that assumption (which is what you seem to be saying in your comment), and if all the Supreme Court has done is to simply interpret the law (which, after all, is what its primary responsibility is), well then, I’m wrong in labeling this interpretation as dictatorial.
But if it is the case that the Surpreme Court has encroached (borderline-encroached, that is) into what ought to be the domain of elected representatives of the people (which, it seems from your comment, is NOT the case), then we see a “good” decision passed in ways that are distinctly dangerous. But of course, that seems not to be the case, and so what I say does not apply!
Incidentally, this raises interesting questions about the nature of “truth”, and of what is “right”. For instance, the abolition of slavery in the US -- while doubtless an unarguably “good” and “right” decision -- was imposed on large swathes of the population who were then opposed to it. (Again I'm being lazy in simply going by my impression -- and without cross-checking my impression, which could after all be wrong -- that they never actually held a referendum at that time to decide the issue.) The only reliable system we have today is the democratic one : which, as you rightly point out, can result in “tyranny of the majority”. I personally am all for getting rid of the pseudo-legal status that some religions enjoy (notably the Pope and his hordes in many parts of the world, and the representatives of the Prophet [PBUH] in other parts of the world -- both these can actually compel followers to pay up tithes or Zakat, and also can, in some cases, actually influence actual punishment for all kinds of weird “offences” like blasphemy, apostasy, and what have you). But to attempt to do this in the teeth of the views of the majority would be dictatorial, we’d then probably be administering medicine that could be worse than the disease it seeks to cure.
I suppose we have no option but to live with this “tyranny of the majority” (it would be “tyranny” only when our views differed from the majority’s, I suppose). What I was talking of was, actually, “tyranny of a minority that happens to be in a position to have their views imposed on others”. That’s what I’d thought the SC judgment was. If that isn’t what it was (technically speaking, basis the relevant terms in the Constitution), well then, it’s all good : a just judgment passed in perfectly legal ways.
But why, then, do the howlers howl? So many of them? Are they all actually bigots and homophobes who are personally against gay rights? Or are they, too, like me, lazy people who’ve been gassing off about what they thought was happening, without taking the trouble to actually read the judgment and check the Constitution and the laws?
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | July 09, 2015 at 02:27 AM
Appreciative Reader, the basis of the Supreme Court decision is that people have to be treated equally under the law. If a state has a law allowing two people to marry, they can't discriminate between people, permitting some to marry and turning down others.
So the Supreme Court didn't really make a new law. It simply ruled that existing laws have to be applied equally to everybody. See:
http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/06/supreme-court-ruling-gay-marriage-a-constitutional-right/
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Quote from ruling:
"These considerations lead to the conclusion that the right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty.
The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them. Baker v. Nelson must be and now is overruled, and the State laws challenged by Petitioners in these cases are now held invalid to the extent they exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite sex couples. [at 22-23]"
Posted by: Brian Hines | July 09, 2015 at 08:43 AM
Thanks for the link, Brian. Having spent so much time "opining" on this issue, it's about time I spent a little bit more peering into the horse's mouth. I've taken a print-out, to go through later (being one of those apparent dinosaurs who like to do their heavyish reading via paper).
Just a thought, without at this time having actually gone through that print-out: if "two people marrying" is interpreted simply as "any two people marrying", might that not open the floodgates on all kinds and shades of "unions", threesomes, foursomes, all kinds of permutations and combinations? That seems an obvious enough extension, although I don't think I've seen this mentioned or heard it spoken of. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong in an officially sanctioned foursome, if that makes the four involved happy.
I'm firmly for same-sex marriages myself, and in any case have no skin in this particular ruling, but I'd have thought it would be cleaner to specifically legislate these things, without any scope of ambiguity. I expect that "two people" marrying back 250 years ago would have implied "two people of different sexes" entering into "exclusive matrimony". I doubt the Founding Fathers would have meant anything different. They were wrong in so implying, true ; also true, that we have no need to stay imprisoned in narrow values of the past : so why not bring in the change cleanly through the front door? I mean that's what legislators are meant to do, right, make laws?
But there I go, gabbing off again without first having read the stuff. The ruling is what it is, and thanks for link.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | July 13, 2015 at 12:17 AM