It has been an eventful term for the U.S. Supreme Court, which has provided many closely decided cases and ended with the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. For those interested in free speech and religious liberty, there have been plenty of decisions to keep track of and digest. Here is what you need to know.

Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission

The story is well-known. Jack Phillips, a Christian cake shop owner from Colorado, refused to create a cake for the same-sex “wedding” of two men. They filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which held that Mr. Phillips violated the state’s public accommodation laws. Much of the litigation centered around whether creating a wedding cake fell under the free expression protections of the First Amendment, but the Court punted on this argument, leaving it for a future case. Instead, the Court ruled for Mr. Phillips on two separate grounds.

First, the Commission did not employ religiously neutral standards when deciding Mr. Phillips case, and instead showed unwarranted hostility towards his Christian faith. One official on the Commission even referred to Mr. Phillips’ faith as “one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use.”

Second, the Court found that the Commission had used different standards for different bakery owners. An individual named Bill Jack (no relation to Jack Phillips) went to several bakeries asking them to create a cake with a message critical of homosexuality derived from the Bible and was—unsurprisingly—refused service. When complaints were filed, the Commission found that bakeries can refuse to make a cake with a message they deem to be derogatory.

The popular narrative is that this case was decided on narrow grounds and sets little precedent for future cases. However, Masterpiece has already proven to be more influential than that narrative suggests. Anti-religious animus by government officials is common in religious liberty cases, and there’s no better example than Arlene’s Flowers.

Arlene’s Flowers Inc. v. Washington

Similar to Jack Phillips, Barronelle Stutzman, a Washington florist, refused to offer her services for a same-sex wedding. However, in this case, when she refused to create a floral arrangement for a same-sex couple, it was not the couple who took action. Rather, the state’s attorney general, on his own initiative, filed a complaint against Ms. Stutzman, showing unusual hostility towards her religious beliefs. This led to the Washington Supreme Court holding that Ms. Stutzman engaged in unlawful discrimination. However, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the decision and remanded it back to the state supreme court to consider the decision in light of Masterpiece.

National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra

This case had less headline appeal than Masterpiece but will likely end up being the more influential in First Amendment jurisprudence. The Court found that California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which forced pro-life pregnancy centers to post disclosures about the state’s abortion services, to be a violation of the pregnancy centers’ free speech rights. The decision was important on several fronts. Most notably, the Court refused to create a lesser standard of First Amendment protection for “professional speech.” The argument was that the state should be given greater power to prevent and compel the speech of professionals (like doctors, lawyers, and mental health counselors) than the usual First Amendment protections would allow. But Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, criticized such “professional speech” doctrine as being a tool to suppress unpopular ideas or information. The decision may open possible litigation on the issue of so-called reparative therapy bans, which ban professional counselors from talking with minors about their unwanted same-sex sexual attraction.

In his concurrence, Justice Kennedy came down particularly hard on California for its intolerance of the pro-life viewpoint:

The California Legislature included in its official history the congratulatory statement that the Act was part of California’s legacy of “forward thinking.” But it is not forward thinking to force individuals to “be an instrument for fostering public adherence to an ideological point of view [they] fin[d] unacceptable.” It is forward thinking to begin by reading the First Amendment as ratified in 1791; to understand the history of authoritarian government as the Founders then knew it; to confirm that history since then shows how relentless authoritarian regimes are in their attempts to stifle free speech; and to carry those lessons onward as we seek to preserve and teach the necessity of freedom of speech for the generations to come.

Trump v. Hawaii

This case stems from then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s promise of a “Muslim ban” during the 2016 presidential campaign. Initially, President Trump signed an order that banned entry in the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries regardless of visa status. However, after getting blocked by the lower courts because of its disproportionate effect on Muslims and because of several anti-Muslim statements from the Trump administration, the president issued a moderated version of the order. This time, the order did not outright ban travel from the seven countries but it did add extra scrutiny before people were allowed to enter the U.S. The final order was also backed by evidence that the nations with restricted access posed legitimate national security risks and were not just chosen based on anti-Muslim animus.

Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out that although five of the seven countries with restricted access were predominantly Muslim, the countries made up only 8% of the world’s Muslim population and were previously designated as posing national security risks. The decision continues the longstanding judicial deference to the Executive Branch on decisions affecting national security. The High Court also renounced the infamous Korematsu v. United States decision, which allowed the executive branch to establish internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.

Janus v. AFSCME

This case is not just of interest for its First Amendment jurisprudence but also its close connection to Illinois politics. Illinois was one of the 22 states that allowed unions to charge nonmembers fees for the costs of collective bargaining with employers. Mark Janus, a government social worker from Springfield, filed suit against Illinois arguing that the government requiring him to pay a private organization like a union violated his First Amendment right to free speech and association. By subsidizing the union’s administrative costs, Janus argued that he was being forced by the government to support the union’s political activism. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed in a 5-4 decision. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the law “violates the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern” like tax increases or collective bargaining rights. One important distinction is that this ruling only applies to public sector unions, not to any in the private sector.

Rowan County v. Lund

One notable case that did not get the U.S. Supreme Court review comes from Rowan County, North Carolina, where the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal barred the opening prayer at county board meetings. The prayer was led by the elected commissioners, who took turns leading at each meeting. Three residents were offended by the prayers and sued the county. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the prayer policy as violating the Establishment Clause despite clear precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court allowing public prayers in Town of Greece v. Galloway. Unfortunately, the High Court denied cert (i.e., declined to review the lower court decision) on the county’s appeal, and the Fourth Circuit’s decision stands.

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Written by Daniel Horowitz

In case you thought that the potential to flip Justice Kennedy’s seat alone will bring us back to the constitutional promised land, think again. So long as the lower courts are not restrained, we will never return to the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

There is nothing more radical than a lower court granting standing to random plaintiffs to sue against non-coerced public prayer in county government meetings, prayers that have been going on since our founding. Yet a district judge in 2015 and the en banc decision of the radical Fourth Circuit in 2017 barred Rowan County, North Carolina, from opening council sessions with a prayer, similar to what our federal Congress does every day. [Last week], the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant certiorari to the appeal from Rowan County, despite three years of being under a tyranny that the judges know is unconstitutional.

We shouldn’t even need to get into court precedent to understand our heritage and the true meaning of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. But just four years ago, in Town of Greece v. Galloway, Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority that as long as the prayer “comports with our tradition and does not coerce participation by nonadherents,” there is no room for judicial intervention. “To hold that invocations must be non-sectarian would force the legislatures sponsoring prayers and the courts deciding these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech,” Kennedy wrote in the 2014 case.

The Fourth Circuit rejected precedent because this prayer, in the court’s estimation, was tantamount to coercion because it makes non-religious attendees feel like “outsiders” and “the overall atmosphere was coercive, requiring them to participate so they ‘would not stand out.’” (More on that case and how contrary it is to our founding here.)

For the U.S. Supreme Court not to take the appeal is egregious, especially given that the Sixth Circuit recently ruled the other way, triggering a circuit split. Justice Thomas, as has become his tradition recently, dissented from the decision to deny cert. Thomas noted, “The Fourth Circuit’s decision is both unfaithful to our precedents and ahistorical” and observed, “For as long as this country has had legislative prayer, legislators have led it.” Gorsuch joined the dissent.

There are a number of important observations to be made here in light of the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy, calling into question our ability to change the direction of the judiciary absent broader reforms:

• Aside from the contorted construction of the First Amendment inherent in this ruling, the courts are continuing to grant standing to random plaintiffs (as straw men for the ACLU) who have no justiciable injury-in-fact other than that their sensibilities are offended. The notion that you can even take such a policy to court is absurd and has grown the power of the courts to that of a legislature rather than an individualized adjudicative body. So long as the Left can lodge hundreds of frivolous lawsuits on important abstract policies every day and have the most liberal districts and circuits uphold them, the shift on the U.S. Supreme Court will not bring much relief. The ACLU and its offshoot organizations essentially have unlimited power so long as the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t change its policies and more aggressively police the lower courts.

• The fact that Roberts knows there will be a more conservative fifth justice added to this wing of the court in the fall and still refused to take up the case is all the more disturbing and demonstrates that we cannot rely on him to overturn these insane lower court rulings expeditiously.

• There is no such thing as a conservative win at the U.S. Supreme Court. Lower court justices will always find hairs to split in any case that is not 100 percent identical and completely ignore precedent, something conservative lower court judges will never do in defiance of liberal U.S. Supreme Court opinions. This is why just hours after the high court affirmed the president’s full power to place conditions on entry, a California judge said that the president must find every single family entering illegally and unite them within 30 days. In another ludicrous ruling on immigration, a New York federal judge said yesterday that the Trump administration cannot promulgate a rule requiring the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement to personally sign off on the release of illegal immigrant child detainees. Yes, we have no sovereignty, and the president has no powers to even establish some oversight before swamping the country with foreign nationals, who flood into our schools and communities and who often join MS-13. Chief Justice Roberts said that there are no limits to the president’s power to regulate entry into the country, but that will not stop lower courts from granting standing to illegal aliens to sue against every minute piece of policy.

This is all to say that unless the lower courts are dealt with, we will continue to suffer increasingly at the hands of the lower courts even as the membership on the U.S. Supreme Court officially gets better. The bottom line is: We don’t have five Clarence Thomases and will not get them any time soon.

It is incumbent upon conservatives in Congress to create a movement to reorient the power of the lower courts. Rather than the default being that any random court can shut down our heritage and system of governance for years until the U.S. Supreme Court grants relief – if ever – the injunction should automatically be placed on hold until and unless the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the case and affirms the ruling. Granting a congressional-created court supremacy power over the other branches of government is a case of the inmates running the asylum. If the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to act supreme to its own underlings, then why should we respect its supposed “supremacism” over the rest of us?

This article was originally published at ConservativeReview.com

So much good news from the U.S. Supreme Court this week, including the announcement of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s impending retirement and the 5-4 decision in the NIFLA v. Becerra case, which asserts that the speech of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers is, indeed, protected speech.

Justice Kennedy surprised the nation by announcing his retirement at the end of July, giving President Donald Trump another opportunity to continue to restore respect for constitutional principles and historical American values. Perhaps we will see that proverbial long arc of justice bending more often toward justice.

Justice Kennedy surprised again, this time in NIFLA v. Becerra. Fascistic California lawmakers eager to impose their beliefs by any unethical means at their disposal passed “The California Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency Act” (FACT Act) which requires the following:

Clinics that are licensed must notify women that California provides free or low-cost services, including abortions, and give them a phone number to call. Its stated purpose is to make sure that state residents know their rights and what health care services are available to them. Unlicensed clinics must notify women that California has not licensed the clinics to provide medical services.

Several crisis pregnancy centers sued, claiming that the law abridged their First Amendment speech protections. A district court voted against them, they appealed the decision, and then the nightmarish 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals voted against them as well. That decision was appealed to the Supreme Court, and in a 5-4 decision with Kennedy joining the majority, the Court decided in favor of the crisis pregnancy centers.

In his concurrence in NIFLA v. Becerra, Kennedy ridiculed and scolded the California legislature:

The California Legislature included in its official history the congratulatory statement that the Act was part of California’s legacy of ‘forward thinking.’ But it is not forward thinking to force individuals to ‘be an instrument for fostering public adherence to an ideological point of view [they] fin[d] unacceptable.’ It is forward thinking to begin by reading the First Amendment as ratified in 1791; to understand the history of authoritarian government as the Founders then knew it; to confirm that history since then shows how relentless authoritarian regimes are in their attempts to stifle free speech; and to carry those lessons onward as we seek to preserve and teach the necessity of freedom of speech for the generations to come. Governments must not be allowed to force persons to express a message contrary to their deepest convictions. Freedom of speech secures freedom of thought and belief. This law imperils those liberties.

This decision means, among other things, that pro-life crisis pregnancy centers cannot be forced to communicate information that violates their beliefs.

Kennedy used this teachable moment to educate lawmakers on the constitutional limits on their pernicious efforts to abuse the law to advance their ideological views. It’s a lesson children should be taught repeatedly in government schools but aren’t.

Buried within the NIFLA decision is something even more remarkable. According to Curtis Schube, Legal Counsel for the Pennsylvania Family Policy Institute, “NIFLA also overturned speech restrictions on therapists who assist people with unwanted same sex attraction.” Schube continues:

Laws which ban sexual orientation change efforts (“SOCE” for short) have increasingly entered the national conversation, most recently in California. Before California’s recent attempts to ban all forms of SOCE at any age, California already had such a law in place for minors. The law considered it “unprofessional conduct” to “seek to change sexual orientation” for a minor. Any counselor who violated the law faced professional discipline.  

California’s more recent SOCE laws take an even more extreme position. These laws ban all therapy that aims to change, or even reduce, sexual attraction to the same sex. Therefore, a patient who wants SOCE therapy cannot receive that service without risk to the professional counselor.

In Pickup v. Brown, same sex attracted minors and their parents, as well as counselors who wished to provide their services, claimed that this law violates their First Amendment rights to free speech and free expression. The Ninth Circuit, in 2013, determined that counseling is not speech, but rather professional “conduct.” The “First Amendment does not prevent a state from regulating treatment,” the Ninth Circuit concluded.

The Third Circuit upheld a similar law in New Jersey using the same logic in the 2014 case, King v. Governors of New Jersey. In relying partly upon Pickup, the Third Circuit concluded that counseling is speech (rather than conduct) but classifies that speech as professional speech. The Third Circuit states that a “professional’s services stems largely from her ability to apply… specialized knowledge to a client’s individual circumstances… Thus, we conclude that a licensed professional does not enjoy the full protection of the First Amendment.”

In the NIFLA case, the Ninth Circuit had justified the requirement for pregnancy centers to advertise for abortion as “professional speech,” just like the Ninth and Third Circuits had done for SOCE laws. The Supreme Court opinion overturning the Ninth Circuit’s NIFLA opinion, specifically identified Pickup and King as examples of “professional speech” protected by the First Amendment. Writing for the majority, Justice Thomas… stated: “Some Courts of Appeals have recognized ‘professional speech’ as a separate category of speech that is subject to different rules.” However, “speech is not unprotected merely because it is uttered by ‘professionals.’”

This is a paradigm shift in the existing precedents for SOCE bans.

Thomas seized the opportunity to provide protections to many other professions as well. “Professionals might have a host of good-faith disagreements, both with each other and with the government, on many topics in their respective fields.” He identifies doctors and nurses who disagree on the prevailing opinions on assisted suicide or medical marijuana as examples of good faith disagreements. So too are lawyers and marriage counselors who disagree on prenuptial agreements and divorces, and bankers and accountants who disagree on how to commit money to savings or tax reform. One would have to conclude that Justice Thomas’ intent is to protect all professionals from being regulated on matters of good faith disagreement.

There is no settled judgment within the mental health community regarding the efficacy and value of counseling for minors or adults who experience unwanted same-sex attraction. There is no settled judgment about the cause or causes of such attraction. Even the liberal American Psychological Association acknowledges that causation is unknown and is likely—in its view—a result of both nature and nurture. There is, however, fairly broad consensus within academia—including among homosexual scholars that “sexual orientation” is fluid. Kudos to Justice Thomas for providing a constitutional pathway to overturning bans that restrict the First Amendment speech rights of mental health professionals.

And kudos to Justice Anthony Kennedy for his week of surprises.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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Written by Mark. J. Fitzgibbons

The importance of Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away this past weekend, is based not just in what he said in his U.S. Supreme Court opinions, but how he said it.

Famous for his biting and even entertaining dissents, Scalia at times (and usually the right ones) expressed a common sense moral outrage at both his liberal and less consistent conservative colleagues. He was the ‘everyman’ in his outrage, saying what we might want to say about their departures from sound constitutional jurisprudence, but far more gifted with a legal genius shaped by an originalist view of the Constitution — and a wittiness that made conservatives smile and chuckle.

His flamboyant style of writing legal opinions made him what marketing guru Seth Godin calls a “purple cow.” He stood out in a field of more common brown cows. But more than that, it was the boldness of his style that made him an intellectual leader for originalism. In a city and system of institutions that tend to stifle and hold back the candid, he made candor about the original intent of the Constitution his brand.

He gave conservatives hope that the Constitution would not be lost for a lack of honesty or standing by principle, the shortage of which are trademarks of Washington and government.

Scalia understood that American constitutional law is based in the morality that civil society should be structured such that we should do no harm to others. The “we” includes government. The Constitution is structured to limit government’s harm to individuals and our God-given rights. Scalia understood the need for judicial fidelity to that structure.

This rule of law over government itself is a key to originalism, and creates a bright-line contrast with the progressive view that the ends of those in government are at least almost always what are best for the rest of us despite transgressing the Constitution. The Founders understood both the perpetual necessity and dangers of government, and therefore structured the governing law over government — the Constitution — to limit the dangers.

Scalia was criticized by liberals in the legal profession, particularly academicians, for his famously biting opinions. Some claimed Scalia’s ‘zingers’ created contempt for the courts. To the contrary, it was Scalia’s deep and passionate respect for the role of the courts in our constitutional structure that led to his judicial poking at how some judges have an inflated and faulty sense of their authority.

In his dissent to the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing a constitutional right to gay marriage, for example, he wrote this about the majority opinion: “I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of [founding-era Supreme Court Justices] John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

Justice Scalia was certainly not above growing in his understanding of the Bill of Rights. Known to many as a law-and-order conservative, Scalia nevertheless wrote one of the most important decisions in recent decades about the protections guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment for searches and seizures.

His majority opinion in U.S. v. Jones from 2012 brought the Fourth Amendment back to its roots in concepts of “trespass.” His opinion countered a dangerous neglect of property rights by progressives who, not fond of property rights, favored a less comprehensive “privacy” focus, which had controlled Fourth Amendment jurisprudence for some decades to the exclusion of a property rights approach.

Scalia wrote,

[F]or most of our history the Fourth Amendment was understood to embody a particular concern for government trespass upon the areas (“persons, houses, papers, and effects”) it enumerates . . . But as we have discussed, the . . . reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test has been added to, not substituted for, the common-law trespassory test.

Scalia led for civil liberties by returning to this originalist understanding of the Fourth Amendment, which mentions property but not privacy. The common law concepts of trespass on our persons and property, and our rights in their security vis-a-vis others who seek to intrude on that security, are broader that mere privacy. Scalia recognized in this opinion that to prevent harm — but only after following basic procedures or protocols designed to limit abuses by government — may searches and seizures occur. When government neglects the notions of trespass inherent in the Fourth Amendment, even our privacy is threatened.

Scalia also became more of a First Amendment champion. His disappointing dissent in McIntryre v. Ohio Election Commission from 1995 about anonymous political speech was countered by Justice Clarence Thomas in a short treatise on the subject in the form of a concurring opinion.

Scalia would later become one of the most reliable justices on the First Amendment. In expressly targeting the “dangerous dissent” by Justice Stevens in the Citizens United case, Scalia exposed Stevens’ poor attempt to come across as using an originalist approach against the First Amendment. Stevens, no originalist, was throttled by Scalia’s scathing concurring opinion:

The Framers didn’t like corporations, the [Stevens] dissent concludes, and therefore it follows (as night the day) that corporations had no rights of free speech. Of course the Framers’ personal affection or disaffection for corporations is relevant only insofar as it can be thought to be reflected in the understood meaning of the text they enacted—not, as the dissent suggests, as a freestanding substitute for that text. But the dissent’s distortion of proper analysis is even worse than that. Though faced with a constitutional text that makes no distinction between types of speakers, the dissent feels no necessity to provide even an isolated statement from the founding era to the effect that corporations are not covered, but places the burden on petitioners to bring forward statements showing that they are (“there is not a scintilla of evidence to support the notion that anyone believed [the First Amendment ] would preclude regulatory distinctions based on the corporate form.”

As the life and work of Justice Scalia are honored and remembered, conservatives would do well to be grateful for his bold leadership on behalf of the originalist moorings of constitutional jurisprudence.

This article was originally posted at AmericanThinker.com

For years now, anti-Christian activists have been pushing the hate button and accusing those of us who hold to biblical morality and family values of being intolerant, hate-filled bigots (and worse).

But this strategy, seen most recently in the attack on godly twin brothers, Jason and David Benham, will inevitably defeat itself. After all, when the alleged victims are the bullies and the alleged tolerant ones are full of bigotry, their rhetoric cannot be taken seriously.

Back in 2008, as Californians voted to preserve marriage with the Proposition 8 marriage amendment, the amendment was quickly dubbed Prop Hate, as if the only way anyone could believe that marriage was the union of a man and woman was if they were full of hate.

But that was only the beginning. In Sacramento, demonstrators held signs reading: 

• Prop 8=American Taliban
• Ban Bigots
• Majority Vote Doesn’t Matter
• 52%=Nazi [this referred to the 52-48% vote in favor of Prop 8]
• Don’t Silence the Christians, Feed Them 2 the Lions
• Your Rights Are Next

Taliban? Nazis? Feed them to the lions?

This kind of demonization will only defeat itself in the long run exposing who the real bigots are.

In the last week, as soon as my newest book was released, I was accused of being the incarnation of the late Fred Phelps (infamous for his “God hates fags” protests), as well as branded the leader of my own “religious cult” that “requires human sacrifices.” (I’m not making this up.)

So, by writing a book filled with compassion and speaking of God’s great love for those who identify as LGBT, also urging the Church to recognize the unique struggles faced by those with same-sex attractions, I have become a hate-filled bigot and cult leader.

It’s like calling Shaquille O’Neal small or Bill Gates poor.

At some point reality kicks in – in this case, the moment someone reads the first pages of my book (or the middle pages or the last pages) – and instead of advancing their cause, the anti-Christian activists undermine their own.

In a blog post entitled, “The homophobic rantings of Michael L Brown,” Jay H. wrote, “Fred Phelps is dead. Long live Fred Phelps, apparently. Or rather his new incarnation: Michael L. Brown.”

Unfortunately for Jay H., when people actually read my book, rather than “homophobic rantings,” they find the opposite. As one reader noted, “[Brown] . . . freely uses life testimonies of people who were divinely delivered from homosexuality, and others NOT divinely delivered from homosexuality. This isn’t cherry-picked propaganda here…there are sections in this book that are very sobering for [an] evangelical believer to read.”

And so, readers quickly realize that I am no more the new Fred Phelps than I’m the new Michael Jordan, and the anti-Christian rhetoric exposes itself.

That’s what is happening with my good friends David and Jason Benham, Christian businessmen and committed husbands and fathers.

They were about to be the stars of a new reality show on HGTV that featured them helping hurting families get their dream homes, until a single post on RightWingWatch caused HGTV to pull the plug. (For those unfamiliar with RightWingWatch, the website is a project of Norman Lear’s ultra-liberal People for the American Way. The website references Christian family activist Phyllis Schafly 351 times, conservative political leader Gary Bauer 334 times, President Ronald Reagan 111 times, author Chuck Colson 57 times, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas 37 times, just to give a few examples. You can be sure most all of the references were not flattering.)

Shortly after HGTV announced its decision, a young man on YouTube opined that the Benham brothers were “the textbook definition of a psychopath” and that “they have no feelings, no consideration for other people.”

The problem, of course, is that the moment you get to know David and Jason – or even watch them on a TV interview for a few minutes or see them interacting with their families – you realize that they are not the ones who need help. It’s the young man on YouTube who needs help, and I can guarantee that if they had the opportunity, the Benhams would reach out to him directly to show him the love of God. (When I played part of this YouTube clip for Jason on my radio show, he responded with real compassion and concern.)

But it’s not just some anonymous YouTuber who is spouting such extreme, self-disqualifying anti-Christian rhetoric.

Dan Savage, a leading gay activist (and sex columnist) supported HGTV’s decision, comparing the Benham’s pro-family viewpoints to “white people” who used to “go on TV and say the most racist [expletive] imaginable (argue against legal interracial marriage, argue in favor of segregation) and keep their jobs and be invited back on TV to say that [expletive] a second time.”

Savage facetiously remarked that “hating the [expletive] out of gay people is something all Christians have in common,” titling his blog, “HGTV Cancels Reality Show After Twin Stars Anti-Gay Activism and Rabid Homophobia Exposed.”

What is rabid, however, is not the position of the Benhams. It is Dan Savage’s militant and vicious anti-Christian rhetoric that is rabid, and so, when reasonable, thinking people listen to Savage and to the Benham brothers, it’s easy to see who is filled with hate and who is filled with love.

Eventually, as those who claim to be champions of tolerance and diversity continue their crusade to silence and defame those who differ with them, they will ultimately defeat themselves.

Watch and see.

This article was originally posted at the TownHall.com blog.