The intolerant Left thirsts for blood
The Left has won the culture war, and now it's exiling anyone with sympathy for the losing side. Two recent incidents evince a growing trend to try to ban any view on gender or sexuality from public life that is to the Right of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Federalist Society at Yale Law School recently incurred the wrath of students because it invited Kristen Waggoner to speak. Waggoner is a renowned attorney at a public-interest law firm who was part of a successful Supreme Court case.
Why would a speaking invitation to a successful female attorney trigger the Yale lefties?
Their outrage was stoked because the case Waggoner won was Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which her employer, Alliance Defending Freedom, successfully protected Jack Phillips’ freedom of conscience. Phillips wouldn’t create a cake celebrating a same-sex wedding. Working for ADF made Waggoner unfit to speak at Yale, the students argued.
Shortly after this, halfway across the country, the San Antonio City Council approved an expansion of the airport on the condition the airport exclude a Chick-fil-A that was in the original plan. The reason is that Chick-fil-A is deemed guilty of “anti-LGBTQ behavior” because its owners view marriage in the same way it has been viewed for all but the last few of the past few thousand years: as an exclusively heterosexual institution.
These episodes demonstrate the illiberalism and intolerance of the Left, which is now willing to use governmental and institutional power to smash those who don’t agree with it on sexual morality.
Our culture rightly regards some opinions as beyond the bounds of reasonable debate. We’d expect a city to be unwelcoming to a restaurant whose owner funded the Islamic State. We wouldn’t expect Yale Law School to host speakers advocating slavery.
What makes these recent stories of intolerance so striking is that the views and actions being branded as intolerable are entirely within the mainstream.
Chick-fil-A’s supposed offense is being charitable to groups that propound the standard Christian teaching on marriage and sex. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army are two of the groups the fast food chain has supported, to the outrage of left-wing critics, whose principal skill is to be outraged.
San Antonio City Councilman Roberto Treviño led the push to exclude Chick-fil-A, issuing a statement with the ironic phrase, “Everyone has a place here, and everyone should feel welcome when they walk through our airport.” The disjunction between words and actions reminds one of the "Monty Python" sketch in which a hunter proclaims, "I love animals. That's why I kill 'em."
Everyone has a place, except for anyone who supports the work of the Salvation Army. In short, conservative Christians don’t count as people in the eyes of the San Antonio City Council.
The Yale students, who successfully extracted “reforms” from the administration, were outraged by ADF’s arguments in Masterpiece, a case ADF won 7 to 2. So arguing a case where Justice Elena Kagan agrees with you but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not now qualifies as right-wing bigotry.
The bounds of permissible dissent are not only moving very far to the Left, but they are also getting narrower and narrower.
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