Not much time has passed since Christian baker Jack Phillips fought to defend his choice not to make cakes celebrating homosexual unions (2018), and Christian florist Baronelle Stutzman dealt with multiple lawsuits regarding her choice not to arrange flowers for similar functions (2021). Yet, earlier this December, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments for 303 Creative v. Elenis, a case which is shaping up to be the next high-profile skirmish between the homosexual movement and Christian providers of wedding services. The civil rights snipers are at the same old game again—this time zeroing in on Christian wedding website designer Lorie Smith.

IFI’s cultural affairs writer Laurie Higgins has already slashed apart the argument against Smith in a mic-drop opinion piece on this case. And with legal battles like these, it’s often very easy to uncover the left’s real agenda, an agenda that deserves a floodlight and an industrial-size vacuum cleaner. But while it’s not hard to see where the left is going, it’s often harder to see how they even got here in the first place. Our society has gone through decades of liberalization—supposedly intended to free us from government censorship—but is now beholding the rise of censorship yet again.

For its first century and a half, America was a nation permeated by Christian values. These values didn’t just sit nice and proper in the pews on Sunday morning—they actually influenced the country. In 1811, eminent jurist James Kent issued the landmark ruling People v. Ruggles, upholding a blasphemy case on the grounds that “we are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply ingrafted upon Christianity.” This case stood as good law for well over a century, joined by a host of other cases all agreeing that the government—even while submitting to the free speech protections of the First Amendment—had proper authority to prohibit blasphemy.

Some cases explicitly acknowledged that this was because Christian morals undergirded so much of our society (see Updegraph v. Commonwealth [1824], State v. Chandler [1837]), and others painted it more broadly as maintaining societal order (see Commonwealth v. Kneeland [1838], State v. Mockus [1921], Oney v. Oklahoma City [1941]). Whether it was openly stated or subtly implied, our nation’s legal system acknowledged that Christianity occupied a special place in our societal fabric. Therefore, government had legitimate authority to censor blasphemy in order to preserve legitimate community standards. But that wasn’t all: if you were propagating such other types of caustic speech as the lewd, the obscene, the profane, the libelous, or fighting words, the First Amendment would not save you (see Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire [1942]).

However, this state of affairs did not last forever. In a series of unfortunate developments in 20th-century legal opinion, America’s culture and law began to view “expression” as a good in-and-of-itself, regardless of whether the expression communicated something good or bad. Because “expression” became a good of its own, this now meant that any attempts to suppress the act of speaking—whether you were publicly displaying a four-letter word in a courthouse or publishing pornography—were harmful to society, and violations of the First Amendment (see Cohen v. California [1971] and Miller v. California [1973], respectively). And therefore, the label “freedom of expression” was now all that was needed to ward off those oppressive government censors trying to stamp out individualism and human dignity with their mumbo-jumbo about public morality.

After Burstyn v. Wilson (1952), blasphemy laws themselves were relegated to the dustbin along with all those other archaic colonial relics of religious intolerance. We had now entered a blessed era in which freedom of expression was king, and we could forget about any absolute standards for public morality because we had opened up our society to an open marketplace of ideas. Everything anyone wanted to say—except for the rare case of a clear and present danger—was given a fair hearing, Christians and pornographers alike.

If that sounds odd, it’s because it is. The contemporary interpretation of the First Amendment strives for a weirdly laissez-faire society in which our only definite core value is the absence of any definite core values. And so, Christians and pornographers now team up against the common enemy of “censorship,” which is really the only enemy left in the ring—now that we’ve given a big warm hug to all contradictory points of view at the same time. This self-contradictory societal plan might have tottered along for a few decades, but we are beginning to see it fall before our eyes. Core values are what hold societies together. Without them, societies are merely amorphous population statistics, without any form of identity. Thus, every society has an orthodoxy which it enforces, and now that we’ve evicted Christianity and swept the house clean, a new orthodoxy has moved in. Now we’ve gotten to the 303 Creative case.

The new orthodoxy is the religion of tolerance, and its blasphemy laws are creatively re-named “hate speech” laws. If you tolerate—i.e., accept and affirm—whatever manners of sinful behavior are dictated by societal winds, you can expect to live a happy and peaceful life. If, however, you dare to promote and live out ideas that blaspheme against the prevailing orthodoxy, say, that marriage is an institution ordained by God to join one man and one woman together for life, you can expect to be hounded by the government.

“Wait a minute!” you say, “Aren’t we supposed to be living in a society where we can all speak our mind and live out our own religious convictions?” “Ah, yes,” is the reply, “but of course that doesn’t apply to hateful [translation: blasphemous] speech like yours. You can say what you want as long as you don’t offend other people [translation: the prevailing orthodoxy]. Since your conscience contradicts the fundamental principles of tolerance, you must violate your conscience or pay the price.”

And here the real gloves have come off. The period of liberalization was really just a transition period from one form of censorship to another. In the name of freedom of expression and liberation from ideological tyranny, we threw off the yoke of Christian morality and the accompanying government powers to suppress caustic expression that eroded that foundation. But societies are defined by core ideas—and attempting to value the absence of core values just doesn’t cut it. When we removed the Christian set of core values, it was only a matter of time before we found something else to take its place. And now our censorship policies are moving right back to where we started, this time saluting to the devil instead of to the Lord.

In light of this, it’s time for Christians to stop playing the game that we can all get along without having any rules for getting along. Society will have rules for getting along—the question is whether those will be rules honoring to the Lord or disobedient to Him. As it is now, we relegate Christianity to the personal and private, and acquiesce to the lie that the Constitution requires such a separation of church and state that anything Christian is banned from the realm of public policy. We huddle up next to the pornographers and violent video game manufacturers, and appeal to the fading mantras of “freedom of expression” to justify living out our basic Christian convictions, completely ceding the possibility that there is something objectively true and good about Christianity, something objectively true and good about God’s design for marriage, something objectively true and good about God’s created sexuality. God created the world with a certain created order, and law has an obligation to reflect that order. Period.

Because the legal system runs on precedent, Christian lawyers will often have to appeal to misguided precedent to win needed victories for the side of truth. But it’s important to not let the short game overshadow the long game. The more we appeal to misguided precedent, the more we cement it in legal tradition and the harder it is to eradicate. We must always keep in mind that the ultimate reason we fight to defend the Lorie Smiths of the world is not because censorship is bad. It is because evil is bad—objectively bad, and ought to be so in the eyes of the law—and Lorie Smith is standing for the good.

Truthiness:
the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true;
a quality characterizing a ‘truth’ that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively ‘from the gut’
or because it ‘feels right’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

A disgraceful column in the Chicago Tribune by the often disingenuous Eric Zorn serves as a reminder of how essential dishonesty is in the ultimately tragic effort to normalize homosexuality.

Zorn censoriously castigates Christians who seek to honor God in all that they do, including their work, describing them as “censorious photographers….sour and judgmental looking with revulsion” at homosexual “wedding” partners, and “saying bitterly to the guests ‘Smile, somehow.’” He further censoriously imagines a “reproachful caterer, slamming dishes down to express her contempt” and “an opprobrious deejay or sanctimonious florist grumbling darkly throughout the festivities.”

While glibly imagining these ugly and implausible scenarios, Zorn admits to a complete inability to “imagine that the fuss about gay weddings and their potential to impinge on religious freedom of service providers is a real-life problem.”

While providing not a single case in which a sour and judgmental Christian photographer looked with revulsion at homosexual “wedding” partners, or a reproachful caterer contemptuously slammed dishes, or a deejay or florist grumbled darkly during a reception, he did provide a case in which an actual Christian photographer was sued and fined for her demurral from photographing a lesbian commitment ceremony. And then there are the bakers and florist who are being sued. Oh, and let’s not forget about the fertility specialists who were sued for refusing to inseminate a lesbian, and the bed and breakfast owners who have been sued for not renting their facilities to homosexual couples.  

Zorn’s solution to the problem of the loss of religious liberty is to endorse yet another of obscene sex columnist Dan Savage’s harebrained schemes. Savage, the homosexual activist who describes orthodox Christians as “bat sh**, a**h***le, do***ebags,” has proposed establishing a database of “gay-hostile wedding service providers” whom Zorn describes as embodying a “we don’t serve your kind here” sentiment.

By now the lies of Zorn should be obvious: First, he posits hypothetical scenarios involving imaginary Christians for which he apparently has no evidence. Then he implies that actual Christians refuse to serve homosexuals when he likely knows—or should know—that the photographers, bakers, florists, and fertility specialists do provide their products and services to homosexuals, unless the particular service being requested violates their religious beliefs. In other words, Zorn lies when he suggests that Christians “don’t serve” homosexuals.

Contrast Zorn’s and other “progressives’” lies and ugly ad hominem attacks with Baronelle Stutzman’s response to this debate. She is the Washington florist who declined to provide floral arrangements for the same-sex “wedding” of a homosexual client whom she had served for nine years knowing full well that he was homosexual.

Please watch this moving video and send it to friends (click here).

Zorn rightly presumes that Christians who believe that both the Old and New Testaments condemn homosexual acts (while imploring all sinners to repent and “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness”) will not sign on to such a dubious database. There are countless numbers of Christians who trust the scores of theologians trained in exegesis, including contemporary theologians, who teach that Scripture does indeed condemn homosexual acts. These Christians also believe that Scripture offers those who experience same-sex attraction the same freedom from bondage to sin (which is different from absence of sinful desires) that is offered to sinners who experience other sin predispositions. These Christians would not sign on to such a database.

And why not? (I’ll answer this question as if Savage and Zorn were serious and not merely snotty in their proposal.)

First, orthodox Christians wouldn’t sign on to such a database, because they’re not “gay-hostile.” They don’t hate those who experience homoerotic attraction and affirm a homosexual identity.

Second, they wouldn’t sign on, because those on the Left whose mission is to eradicate conservative moral beliefs will stoop to lies and slander to achieve their pernicious goal.

Without a shred of evidence, “progressives” continually assert the following non-facty, truthies:

• Homosexuality is biologically determined.
• Homosexuality is analogous to race or skin color.
• Homosexuality is in all cases immutable.
• All those who believe homosexual acts are immoral are stupid and ignorant (It is astonishing that “progressives” continue to assert this. I’d like to see Zorn or any other “progressive” debate N.T. Wright, Andrew Wilson, Doug Wilson, Elizabeth Scalia, Patrick Henry Reardon, John Piper, Nancy Pearcey, Robert George, Robert Gagnon, Anthony Esolen, William Lane Craig, D.A. Carson, J.Budziszewski, or Michael Brown on topics related to homosexuality).
• All those who believe that homosexual acts are immoral and that marriage is inherently sexually complementary are motivated by animus (I guess that includes Time Magazine’s Person of the Year: Pope Francis).
• Marriage has no inherent connection to sexual complementarity. (Then whence cometh the “twoness” of marriage?)
• Marriage has no inherent connection to reproductive potential.
• Marriage is constituted solely by love. (Then why not allow five people to marry? Why not allow two brothers to marry? And why should marriage be conceived of as a union between those who experience erotic/romantic love? Why not expand the definition of marriage to include platonic friends?)
• Children have no inherent right to know and be raised by their biological parents whenever possible (If biological heritage is so irrelevant as to render the creation of intentionally motherless or fatherless children justifiable, how do “progressives” account for the fervent public interest in genealogy?)

In a recent Public Discourse essay titled “The Culture of Dishonesty: Abortion, Divorce, and Obamacare,” Carson Holloway questions Americans’ tolerance for deception:

Americans’ acceptance of President Obama’s lies reveals how dangerously comfortable we have become with dishonesty. It will take a profound renovation of our culture to restore truthfulness to its proper place and establish political freedom on a more secure foundation. How did American culture grow so dangerously accustomed to falsehood?

In order to know whether an idea embodies love, one must first know if it’s true. The idea that volitional homosexual acts are morally neutral or morally good is not true and, therefore, promoting it is not loving. Promoting such an idea to young children—as is happening in our publicly subsidized schools—is downright evil.

 Click HERE to support the work and ministry
of Illinois Family Institute.