"We Have Our Own Plan"

One of my current vices, so to speak, is watching the television series Sleepy Hollow. For those of you not following the show, it attempts to mix the events of the Book of Revelations in the Bible with the characters from Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The two main characters are supposed to be the witnesses spoken of in Revelations, while the Headless Horseman is portrayed as one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Absolutely wrong eschatology, and not always the best writing, but I find the show to generally be engaging.

In any event, the episode from this past week has one of the evil characters pointing out that, notwithstanding the prophecies in Revelations, "we have our own plan."

Turning to the real world, Satan really does have his own plan. And that plan is to destroy what which is good, in part, as Isaiah described it, by calling that which is evil, "good," and that which is good, "evil." The most recent example of this is the push for gay marriage, which increasingly is the basis for attacking religious beliefs generally, and Christian beliefs specifically. Now, this has been merged with some of the traditional rhetoric of the racist left to describe a "Christian privilege." From the Washington Examiner:

It's settled, then: Christian conservatives use religion as a justification for their discriminatory behavior, and Americans will only enjoy true religious freedom when their so-called "religious liberty" claims are defeated.

That was the consensus Thursday at a panel discussion sponsored by the Center for American Progress in Washington.

"People [are] using the term 'liberty' when they really mean 'my liberty, your slavery,'" the Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, said during the discussion. He made the statement while arguing that liberals' view of religious liberty springs from a true, originalist reading of the Constitution that was once universally understood. Unfortunately, he said, the American people have become "confused" about this question because of misleading claims made by the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops.

"You have the Catholic bishops advocating for 'religious freedom,' which doesn't look anything like what religious freedom is in the Constitution," Gaddy said. "Unless we do those kind of dramatic actions [such as the ACLU suing the USCCB] in order to get us back to what the foundation of religious freedom has been all the time, it's going to get worse and worse, with people using the term 'liberty' when they really mean 'my liberty, your slavery.'"

The audience received a similar narrative of religious beliefs functioning as a Trojan horse for discrimination from ACLU senior counsel Eunice Rho, who denounced attempts to pass a Religious Freedom Restoration Act in various states.

"These are very dangerous because they can allow religion to be used to harm others," Rho said.

Gaddy compared Christian florists who don't want to provide service for gay weddings to employers who posted "whites only" signs in their windows.

Gaddy apparently also said that interpretations of the Bible "ought never threaten the federal government and the way people are ruled by law ... an interpretation of the Bible is of little consequence to the guarantee of the Constitution." Gaddy also apparently agreed that liberals "need to start educating, and calling out, Christians for trying to exercise 'Christian privilege.'"

This is consistent with the position taken by Chai Feldblum, whom President Obama appointed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who the article quotes as stating in 2006: "There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that's the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner."

This is, in essence, the position of every court that has decided against conscientious objectors to gay marriage: that religious rights, expressly protected under the Constitution, are preempted by laws and regulations protecting "sexual liberty" which is not even mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. First there was the war against the Second Amendment, which is pretty much over (the weapons allowed civilians are generally unsuitable to protect against a standing army). Now is the war against the First Amendment and our freedom of religion. Unfortunately, so far, we are doing just as badly in protecting our religious rights as the "greatest generation" did protecting our Second Amendment rights.