Traditional Christians at a Critical Juncture – Where We Are and How to Respond – Part 1

Oct 1, 2016 by Jill

by Rick Plasterer, Juicy Ecumenism:

The devastating loss of religious freedom for traditional Christians over the last two decades, barely foreshadowed by earlier religious/secular conflicts about school prayer and monuments, and occasioned largely by homosexual liberation, has left the faithful staggered. We have seen the great mass of Americans either indifferent or hostile, with hostility particularly pronounced from the mass media. The likely election of another liberal Democratic administration will mean another quantum loss of religious freedom, both through legislation and a liberal Supreme Court for the indefinite future, and so now is a good time to assess where we’ve been, see where we’re going, and anticipate how we will respond.

As a recent BreakPoint commentary noted, the battle was really decided by the Romer vs. Evans decision from the Supreme Court in 1996, which essentially said that laws motivated by opposition to homosexuality were unconstitutional. Supposedly based on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, the decision was terrible because it noted, and set aside, the claim of religious conscience against contributing to homosexual behavior as the justification for Colorado’s Constitutional Amendment 2, which prohibited local homosexual rights ordinances (what today we would call sexual orientation and gender identity [SOGI] laws). It was terrible as well because of the obvious partisanship of the decision. As Justice Scalia noted, it blocked a state law which bound local laws in a very ordinary way, accorded “equal protection” (and thus immunity from adverse judgment) to a group identified by the behavior of its members (could not the same logic be applied to drug users?), and went beyond merely claiming a violation of equal protection by citing hostility to homosexuals as an illegitimate motive of the voters, thus attacking the democratic process. As this writer has noted before, the impugning of an idea in the democratic process, in this case, the belief that homosexuality is sinful (in religious terms) or evil (in secular terms), sets government away from constitutional liberalism and towards ideology, with ideas deemed to be oppressive excluded from law and society. Most importantly, the Romer decision implied the denial of what Christians now need, the right to conscientious objection from homosexual behavior.

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