Liberal Intolerance, Round II
To stamp out cultural dissent, the left is willing to stomp on religious liberty.
The political delirium over Indiana’s law protecting minority religious beliefs doesn’t seem to be abating, and the irony is that it may be illustrating why such statutes are necessary. Much of the modern political left has abandoned the American tradition of pluralism in favor of an all-or-nothing social model that brooks no dissent.
On Thursday the Indiana legislature passed and Governor Mike Pencesigned an amendment to the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act emphasizing that the law is not the license to discriminate that it never was. This concession is unlikely to temper the media portrait of Indianapolis as the new Selma, circa 1965, because this rumpus long ago kicked free of the legal merits or even the basic facts. The political goal behind the uproar is to intimidate or destroy people who think they are still allowed to articulate traditional moral convictions.
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Take the family-owned pizza parlor in Walkerton, Indiana—population 2,144. A local TV reporter went door-to-door asking restaurants how they would respond if they were asked to cater a gay wedding. The innocents at Memories Pizza, who had never faced the question in daily business, said that they would prefer not to participate in a hypothetical same-sex pizza party ceremony. Cue the national deluge.