The Pendulum Swings

Evangelical Christian hardliners all over America are screaming to high heaven today over the recent SCOTUS decision recognizing constitutional equal protection rights to gays. They’ve enjoyed government support, endorsement and sponsorship for their religion and religious intolerance for hundreds of years.

Now they think the sky is falling.

The tide has turned.

The pendulum swings.

Just like the nation’s racist hardliners thought the sky was falling when SCOTUS began to recognize constitutional equal protection rights to blacks during the civil rights era, the religious fanatics are in mortal fear over their loss of institutionalized government discrimination against gays.

Baptist minister and former Arkansas Gov., Mike Huckabee, declared for example, that “Gay Marriage Could Criminalize Christianity.” The legalization of same-sex marriage would be a “very dangerous place” for America to go and could lead to civil disobedience, says Huckabee.

In a letter to fellow Christians he vowed to “fight to defend religious liberty at all costs... I refuse to sit silently as politically driven interest groups threaten the foundation of religious liberty, criminalize Christianity, and demand that Americans abandon Biblical principles of natural marriage.” 

“If you lack the backbone to reject judicial tyranny and fight for religious liberty, you have no business serving our nation as President of the United States,” Huckabee warned all the other GOP candidates. “This is not just about marriage... “This is about whether or not a government can begin to put limitations on the conscious and convictions of people who have faith.”

“We will see people of faith lose their jobs, pastors will be sued, churches will lose their tax exempt status,” cried Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America. She predicts that the legalization of gay marriage would lead to greater attacks on Christian Americans. "Now is the time for us to speak up. We must obey God. We are not willing to bend one knee to man.

Of course, all of that is pure nonsense. No one is going to criminalize Christianity. Religious liberty is not in any danger. The sky is not falling. The First Amendment is still intact.

The fact that gays now have equal protection rights under the law in no way diminishes the constitutional rights of religious bigots. But the bigots may no longer enforce their intolerance and bigotry with the assistance of the government like they have done for so many years.

Never mind that.  They’re already planning to defy the US Supreme Court. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal announced today that government officials in his state will be allowed to deny marriage licenses to gays on religious grounds.

North Carolina lawmakers overrode GOP Gov. Pat McCrory’s veto of a law permitting state officials to refuse performing their constitutional duties when it comes to gay marriages.  

It’s the same kind of government defiance of the Constitution that former Alabama Gov. George Wallace did when he stood in front of a school house door to prevent racial integration in that State. It’s like allowing government officials to refuse to perform interracial marriages.

No pastor of any church in America will ever be forced by law to perform gay marriages. But if that pastor is a government official charged with the constitutional and lawful duty to perform marriages, he will have to perform gay marriages or resign his government job. There’s a big difference between government sponsored as opposed to private discrimination.  

The tide is turning.

The pendulum swings.