Interestingly, Emanuel’s former boss, President Barack Obama, had publicly professed the same “values” as Cathy on marriage until barely two months before, when the president announced he had “evolved” into supporting same-sex marriage.17 No matter. Following Emanuel’s statement, Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno quickly announced, “Because of [Cathy’s] ignorance, I will now be denying Chick-fil-A’s permit to open a restaurant in the 1st Ward.”18 San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee tweeted, “Very disappointed #ChickFilA doesn’t share San Francisco’s values & strong commitment to equality for everyone” and then added, “Closest #Chick-FilA to San Francisco is 40 miles away & I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.”19
How would the illiberal left react if companies led by people who supported same-sex marriage were told by conservative Christian mayors that they would be denied permits to operate due to their beliefs not being in sync with local values? There would be justified screams of “bigotry” and “homophobia” within seconds.
The illiberal left reserves a special strain of strident wrath for manifestations or protections of Christian belief in America. Resistance to same-sex marriage is arguably the belief the illiberal left finds most offensive. It’s certainly one of the primary battlefields on which the war on free speech is being waged. The illiberal left has worked hard to convince Americans that opposing same-sex marriage is so inherently immoral that the opposition must be brutally suppressed.
Demonizing is their favorite tactic for silencing disagreement with their position. The illiberal left justifies this demonizing by comparing people who oppose same-sex marriage to segregationists. But dehumanizing and hating black people went hand in hand with segregation. This is not true of opposing same-sex marriage. As we’ve seen with Pope Francis, it is more than possible to hold an orthodox view of homosexuality and respect and love gay people. If the illiberal left spent more time with orthodox Christians they would understand that Pope Francis is not an outlier. It’s easier for the illiberal left to demonize their opponents and sanctify themselves as higher moral beings than treat differences of opinion respectfully. The goal is to make their opponents’ view illegitimate. It’s a tried-and-true debate-ending tactic.
In discussing same-sex marriage, Mark Joseph Stern at Slate asked, “Can a person oppose equal rights for gay people and not be, in some fundamental way, a homophobe? The answer seems to me to be a pretty obvious no.”20 John Shore of the Not All Like That Christians Project wrote at the Huffington Post, “If you vote against gay marriage or gay rights you are a bigot, as surely as anyone who voted against civil rights in the ’60s was a bigot. If you preach against gay rights, you are a bigot. . . . If, in private, you intimate to your dearest friend that you don’t think gay people should be allowed to get married, you are a bigot.”21
If that is true, then hundreds of millions, if not a billion, of the world’s 2.2 billion Christians are bigots. It means that Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were public bigots for most of their lives, as was virtually every Democrat holding elected office until a few years ago. As late as 2008, Barack Obama told Rick Warren that “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian. . . it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”22 But the illiberal left didn’t call him a homophobe or a bigot; he was their savior.
I am a longtime vocal supporter of same-sex marriage. At no point in my life have I not supported it. I readily acknowledge that some people oppose same-sex marriage for the wrong reasons—they are, indeed, prejudiced against gay people. But in my experience, most people who don’t share my opinion—which included, until recently, scores of Democrats—are not bigots but people with sincere and respectable beliefs, often based in a Christian worldview that I otherwise largely share. In either case, authoritarian demands for intellectual conformity and the relentless demonizing of people who don’t support same-sex marriage are inherently illiberal and wrong.
Matthew Vines, the author of God and the Gay Christian is gay and a strong advocate for gay and lesbian rights in the Christian Church. He told me in an interview, “I strongly disagree with those who think same-sex relationships are wrong, but I don’t think the vast majority of them are hateful. I always start by finding what beliefs and values I have in common with someone and affirming those things. That typically helps to create a climate of mutual respect when we discuss the things we don’t agree about.”
The illiberal thought police view it differently. The executive editor of the Huffington Post’s Religion section, Paul Raushenbush, has asserted, “Let’s just be very clear here—if you are against marriage equality you are anti-gay. Done.”23 Camille Beredjick wrote at Patheos, “Stop sugar-coating it. If you’re against marriage equality, you’re. . . against LGBT people.”24 Salon.com ran a story under the headline, “The Bigots Finally Go Down: How Anti-Gay Haters Officially Lost the Marriage Fight.”25 At the Think-Progress blog hosted by the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank founded by former Obama advisor and President Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta, Zach Ford explained that it was right to call those who oppose marriage equality anti-gay and bigots. These are “accurate terms [that] can reinforce that positions against LGBT equality should be treated as taboo, rather than as understandable or defensible.”26 Liberal writer Lindsay Beyerstein has written that “Opposing gay marriage is the moral equivalent of supporting anti-miscegenation laws” and explained that, “By definition, bigots are people with unshakable baseless prejudices. There is absolutely no reason, besides blind prejudice, to deny same sex couples the right to civil marriage.”27 Examples of this sort of illiberal left “logic” are innumerable.28
The relentless stereotyping and demonizing of people who oppose same-sex marriage has paid enormous dividends for the illiberal left. Their views have seeped into the culture to the point that many people think that denying same-sex marriage opponents the right to speak about their views is acceptable. In 2014, an instructor in a philosophy class at Marquette University, a Catholic school, let it be known that opposition to same-sex marriage was unworthy of discussion.29 In a conversation recorded by a student following the class, instructor Cheryl Abbate explained “there are some opinions that are not appropriate, that are harmful” and compared questioning same-sex marriage to sexism and racism. Abbate went on to say that no one should express views that might be “offensive” to any gay student. Abbate told the student, who opposed same-sex marriage, “You don’t have a right in this class . . . to make homophobic comments” and said the student could drop the class. The student complained, but the university took no action against the instructor.30
Marquette political science associate professor John McAdams wrote a blog post criticizing Abbate for refusing to allow criticism of same-sex marriage in class discussions and quoted the conversation Abbate had with the student.31 He then found himself the object of illiberal scrutiny. Inside Higher Ed’s Colleen Flaherty wrote that University of South Carolina associate professor Justin Weinberg argued that McAdams had made Abbate the “target of a political attack,”32 likely stemming from “sexism.”33 Louisiana State University French studies professor John Protevi posted an open letter of support34 of Abbate on his blog blasting McAdams’s “one-sided public attack.”35 Abbate characterized McAdams’s post as “cyberbullying and harassment” and noted, “It is astounding to me that the university has not created some sort of policy that would prohibit this behavior which undoubtedly leads to a toxic environment for both students and faculty.”36
Just to be clear here: the illiberal left considers the victim in this story to be the professor who preemptively silenced a student and compared his views to racism and sexism. Disagreement expressed by McAdams, in an academic environment where rigorous debate should be encouraged, was cast as a bullying attack. Rather than his motivation being reasonably interpreted as wanting to expose illiberal silencing on a campus, McAdams was accused of being motivated by
sexism. This is all standard fare for the illiberal left. Why make a substantive argument when it’s just as easy to smear dissenters as sexist bullies?
While the university brushed off the student’s complaints of being silenced, the administration became vigorously engaged when the illiberal left complained about McAdams’s post. Incredibly, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences sent McAdams a letter37 informing him he was “relieved of all teaching duties and all other faculty activities, including, but not limited to, advising, committee work, faculty meetings and any activity that would involve your interaction with Marquette students, faculty and staff.” He was ordered to stay off campus while he was being investigated for an unnamed transgression. Enclosed was a copy of Marquette’s harassment policy, which appears to be modeled on Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), screenshots of a faculty training session on the policy include “a slide about hypothetical peers Becky and Maria, who ‘have been talking about their opposition to same-sex marriage.’ Hans overhears the conversations, is offended, and reports the two for harassment. Hans’s action is condoned.”38
It’s hard to imagine a more intellectually chilling policy than one that turns students and faculty into informants and punishes them for discussing issues in a manner not sanctioned by university authorities.
When a reporter inquired about the investigation against McAdams, a Marquette spokesperson straight out of Orwell’s 1984 asserted that McAdams had violated the university’s “Guiding Values to which all faculty and staff are required to adhere, and in which the dignity and worth of each member of our community is respected, especially students.” Clearly Marquette’s “Guiding Values” don’t apply to students who oppose same-sex marriage. Marquette was also violating its expressed commitment to free speech in its official handbook, which states, “It is clearly inevitable, and indeed essential, that the spirit of inquiry and challenge that the university seeks to encourage will produce many conflicts of ideas, opinions and proposals for action.”39
Due process was also out the window. McAdams was not informed of his offense, nor was he given an opportunity to defend himself. This treatment blatantly violates another one of Marquette’s show documents, the faculty handbook, which states40 that the university protects professors’ “full and free enjoyment of legitimate personal or academic freedoms of thought, doctrine, discourse, association, advocacy, or action.” Apparently, Marquette’s professed commitments to their students and professors are trumped by their enigmatic and creepy “Guiding Values.” One might also note the irony of an orthodox Catholic position on marriage being ruled as outside the bounds of legitimate discussion at a Catholic university at the hands of the illiberal left who dominate or run so many college and university campuses.
With the illiberal left in charge, even favored academics can go from victor to villain in an instant if they adopt the wrong perspective. University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock was well-respected on the left for his work on liberal causes such as defending a Muslim prisoner’s right to grow a beard while incarcerated in an Arkansas prison and co-writing an amicus brief in United States v. Windsor arguing in favor of same-sex marriage. But Laycock’s support took a hit when his interpretation of the Constitution led to what the illiberal left considered the wrong conclusions. In the lightning-rod Supreme Court case Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., Laycock supported Hobby Lobby, arguing in an amicus brief that the government should not force corporations to provide health insurance covering birth control against their religious beliefs. Laycock also organized a letter to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, cosigned by ten professors at other law schools and sent on University of Virginia School of Law letterhead, arguing that a controversial proposed Arizona law (SB 1062) that would allow businesses to deny service to gays and lesbians based on religious conviction was a necessary and constitutionally sound strengthening of the law to protect religious freedom. I vigorously and publicly disagreed with Laycock’s interpretation in this case but never felt the need to try to delegitimize him as a scholar. Two University of Virginia student activists, Gregory Lewis and Stephanie Montenegro were less tolerant of Laycock’s conclusions that didn’t support their worldview. The duo released an open letter addressed41 to Laycock expressing concern with work he had done which they believed was aiding opponents of LGBT rights and those who were resisting providing contraception under the Affordable Care Act (also known as “Obamacare”). They argued that they wanted “professors to fully understand the implications of their academic work,” as if Laycock should always interpret the Constitution in a way that supports left-wing ideological preferences. The students were not remotely self-conscious about nakedly admitting to supporting some of Laycock’s academic conclusions (the ones that fit with their activist agenda) but not those that didn’t support their views. At no point did the students make a legal argument that undermined Laycock’s conclusions, or any legal argument at all. They merely insisted that Laycock change his interpretation of the Constitution because they didn’t like it.
Then, chillingly, they made an argument that has become increasingly common among the illiberal left: liberal political orthodoxy trumps academic freedom. “While academic freedom has immense value within the walls of the classroom,” they wrote, “[we] invite you into a dialogue with UVA students who are negatively impacted by your work. It is vitally important to balance the collective work of our academic community with the collective impact of that work in communities across the country.” They expressed a desire to start a “dialogue” with Laycock and then filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding, among other things, university-funded travel expenses and cell phone records for the past two-and-a-half years. The students asserted that they wanted “a full, transparent accounting of the resources used by Professor Laycock which may be going towards halting the progress of the LGBT community and to erode the reproductive rights of women across the country.”42 As UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge pointed out at the time, “You don’t start a dialogue with FOIA requests.”43
No, you don’t. Unless you have invented another definition for the word, which is precisely what the illiberal left has done. A “dialogue” with the illiberal left is one in which they inform you of the “right” way to think. Resistance to their demands will result in your being stuck with labels like bigot, misogynist, homophobe, racist, sexist, or some other toxic moniker that’s alienating to the rest of society.
In 2014 a group of prominent religious leaders sent a letter to the White House asking for a religious exemption to a White House executive order that would prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT persons in recruitment, hiring, and training.44 At issue was whether religious organizations, which sometimes contract with the federal government—for instance, in helping with disaster relief—would be barred by the executive order from accepting federal contracts and, if they did accept them, be at risk of anti-discrimination lawsuits. Signers of the letter asking for a religious exemption included the chief executive of Catholic Charities USA, mega-church pastor Rick Warren, and the executive editor of Christianity Today. But it was no conservative manifesto. Former Obama staffer Michael Wear rounded up the signatories, which also included pastor Joel Hunter, who prays regularly with the president, and Stephen Schneck, co-chair of Catholics for Obama in 2012.45
An exemption was predictably opposed by the illiberal left—not because they respectfully disagreed with the religious organizations’ position, but because they cast them as bigots. “This would be a catastrophic erosion of non-discrimination protections,” said Kate Kendell of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “We must tell President Obama loud and clear: no special rights for religious bigotry!!!” wrote activist John Becker. Rachel Maddow asserted on her MSNBC show that the letter was just part of “the floodgates . . . already opening” from the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. The genesis of the
letter, she said, was about conservatives grabbing “every other conceivable advantage . . . by calling what they want to do that’s otherwise against the law a variety of religious freedom.”46 Members of the illiberal left—from ThinkProgress to Daily Kos—echoed the claim that the Hobby Lobby decision had ushered in Armageddon for gay rights.47
Instead, what seems most at risk is the freedom of religious organizations to participate in public life when religious beliefs are deemed “bigotry.” As same-sex marriage and civil unions have become legal in more states, the new legal structure has been utilized to attack religious charities with government contracts. In places like Illinois, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia, for example, Catholic Charities has been forced to shut down their adoption and foster care services because the state demanded they place children with same-sex couples in violation of Catholic teaching on marriage and the family.48
“The new intolerance is an everybody problem . . . because it penalizes people who are a clear net plus for society, people who spend their days helping the poor, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, caring for the cast-off, and otherwise trying to live out the Judeo-Christian code of social justice,” writer Mary Eberstadt said in a 2014 First Things lecture. “More and more, those people are also witnesses to a terrible truth: the new intolerance makes it harder to help the poor and needy.”
Bethany Christian Services is America’s largest adoption agency with approximately 115 offices across thirty-six states. It was founded in 1944 and has had government contracts to provide foster care and adoption programs for more than sixty years. As a Christian organization, Bethany was able to save the government hundreds of thousands of dollars because it could provide services with the help of volunteers, donated financial capital, and less bureaucracy.
Bethany, however, has recently found itself in a contentious situation. When facilitating private adoptions, Bethany will only place children into two-parent families with a mother and a father. When LGBT couples come to Bethany to adopt children, the organization refers them to other agencies that can help them. Bethany does not prevent LGBT couples from adopting children; as an organization it only asks that it be allowed to follow its orthodox Christian belief system by placing children in two-parent families that have a mother and a father.
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