Mark Shea answers the question emphatically:
The real deal is this: People in flyover country are being told the terms of their surrender. This is not about “toleration” and never has been. It’s about the attempt to force people, against their conscience, to approve of homosexual acts and gay “marriage”.
The reality is that the vast majority of the people this law means to protect are not interested in
quizzing strangers about their sex lives and then punishing tthem. Nobody goes into a grocery or hardware store and gets grilled on whether they are gay and nobody wants to know. But the goal of gay lobby is to target people likely to have qualms of conscience about appearing to support gay “marriage”–people who have real issues of conscience–and use the cudgel of the state force them to give the appearance of approval to what they are regard as sin. It’s a form of bullying, something the gay lobby talks about constantly and practices skillfully.
Hence the moral panic as businesses like Apple, which have no trouble trading with Communist butchers in China (and exploiting slave labor there) or gay-murdering butchers in the U.A.E. suddenly develop a “conscience” and bravely face the applause of the Chattering Classes in the US. Here in Washington (which has an RFRA on the books) themayor of Seattle is jumping on the moral panic bandwagon (as the shipping containers from China fill up our port). Hysterical Lefties now do their best Glenn Beck imitation andcompare Christians with a tender conscience to Nazis (threatening that it “will not end well”) for them. Because if you can’t target some mom and pop Christian bakery in Bloomington, smash them with the iron rod of the state (instead of just going to the bakery down the street), and drive them into destitution, you might as well just gas everybody now. By such low tactics (from people who talk perpetually about “bullying“), the Girardian scapegoat will again be sacrificed as the community expends its fury on another in a long trail of designated Emmanuel Goldsteins in order to assure itself of its moral purity.
But no real justice will have been done. The people who do not and never will be able to pretend that gay “marriage” is real or that homosex is not sinful will go on doing so. Power will have been exercised, but not justice. Gay “marriage” remains what it always has been: an ontological impossibility. And gay sex remains what it has always been: intrinsically disordered. No amount of force, fear, and intimidation will change that. Nor will endless attempts to link this to Jim Crow work.
quizzing strangers about their sex lives and then punishing tthem. Nobody goes into a grocery or hardware store and gets grilled on whether they are gay and nobody wants to know. But the goal of gay lobby is to target people likely to have qualms of conscience about appearing to support gay “marriage”–people who have real issues of conscience–and use the cudgel of the state force them to give the appearance of approval to what they are regard as sin. It’s a form of bullying, something the gay lobby talks about constantly and practices skillfully.There's more.
This sort of thing flourishes because of the preponderance of people who are so easily led, so quickly fooled.
God help us in our ignorance.
