The twentieth century taught some of us that totalitarianism is evil. What it taught some totalitarians is that their methods had to change. Do people resist the compulsory destruction of their cherished institutions? Very well, then compulsion must be made to look like liberty.
What our local totalitarians call “nondiscrimination,” “choice,” and “neutrality” are devices by which the coerced substitution of one moral judgment for another is disguised as the suspension of moral judgment.
The state pretends that it is not making judgments about sexuality, just prohibiting discrimination. But discrimination includes merely disapproving of sexual deviance. So the government schools teach children that anything goes, and then the campaign begins to prohibit private schools, religious schools, and the Church from teaching any other view of sexuality.
Or the state pretends that it is not promoting abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide, just allowing people choice. But once these acts are legal, the state says they are a right, so that nurses must be coerced to assist in them, pharmacists must be coerced to dispense drugs that cause them, insurance carriers must be coerced to reimburse for them, and taxpayers must be coerced to pay for them.
Or (this is coming) the state pretends that it is not against monogamy, just neutral among monogamy and other arrangements. But to revise the marriage laws so that these other arrangements are legal forces those who believe in monogamy into a polygamous legal framework, so that if a man takes a second wife, the first wife has no recourse but divorce.
The smoothest camouflage for evil judgment is pretending not to judge. Our local totalitarians learned this a long time ago. The rest of us have been slow to catch on.
Tomorrow: The Constitutional Meaning of Faith