Liberal Intolerance, Round II

Liberal Intolerance, Round II

To stamp out cultural dissent, the left is willing to stomp on religious liberty.

From the Wall Street Journal

The political delirium over Indiana’s law protecting minority religious beliefs doesn’t seem to be abating, and the irony is that it may be illustrating why such statutes are necessary. Much of the modern political left has abandoned the American tradition of pluralism in favor of an all-or-nothing social model that brooks no dissent.

On Thursday the Indiana legislature passed and Governor Mike Pence signed an amendment to the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act emphasizing that the law is not the license to discriminate that it never was. This concession is unlikely to temper the media portrait of Indianapolis as the new Selma, circa 1965, because this rumpus long ago kicked free of the legal merits or even the basic facts. The political goal behind the uproar is to intimidate or destroy people who think they are still allowed to articulate traditional moral convictions.

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Take the family-owned pizza parlor in Walkerton, Indiana—population 2,144. A local TV reporter went door-to-door asking restaurants how they would respond if they were asked to cater a gay wedding. The innocents at Memories Pizza, who had never faced the question in daily business, said that they would prefer not to participate in a hypothetical same-sex pizza party ceremony. Cue the national deluge.

They were suddenly converted into the public face of antigay bigotry across cable news and the Internet, and became the target of a social-media mob, as if they somehow screened for sexual orientation at the register. The small business closed amid the torrent, although a crowd-funding counter-reaction supplied tens of thousands of dollars in recompense.

The episode is a discredit to U.S. civil society, which we used to think was strong and friendly enough to tolerate all people of whatever religious or sexual persuasion.

For the record, the federal and state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, or RFRAs, very rarely implicate gay rights, and most of these religious cases are noncontroversial. They simply say that government must use the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest when infringing on religious practice.

RFRA disputes typically involve Muslim prisoners who are told they cannot wear beards, or the inner-city Chicago churches that zoning laws prohibited from feeding the homeless in 2000, or the Arizona carillon bells that neighbors complained were too loud in 2010. They are about the Sikh who was fired by the Internal Revenue Service in 2005 for carrying a kirpan, the small knife that Sikhs believe is an emblem of justice.

Nonetheless, the Indiana revision clarifies that RFRA does not authorize a business to refuse to offer “services, facilities, use of public accommodations, goods, employment, or housing” on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. This is mostly symbolic, since there is no evidence anyone was doing so before the law passed, but Indiana’s Republicans felt they had little choice lest the state suffer economic damage. The confusion and retreat was not Governor Pence’s finest hour.

Indiana was reacting to unfair abuse from Democrats and corporate leaders eager to demonstrate their social justice bona fides. White House spokesman Josh Earnest flatly and wrongly said the law would “legitimize discrimination,” while several states with their own RFRAs like Connecticut have banned taxpayer-funded travel to Indiana. A raft of companies including Apple and the Indiana-based diesel engine maker Cummins have also denounced the law.

Well—hold on. Liberals have instructed us time and again that corporations aren’t people or persons, that companies cannot express speech and have no right to engage in politics. But now Tim Cook is celebrated for delivering a moral lecture to Hoosiers on behalf of Apple because liberals agree with him. Perhaps Mr. Cook and other CEOs who’ve criticized Indiana should reconsider their offices in China and other places around the world that have contempt for human rights, or in some cases open hostility to gays and lesbians.

To the extent anyone is offering a good-faith criticism, it seems to apply to the narrow exceptions of sole proprietors in the wedding industry, such as florists, bakers, photographers and singers. Our view is that their speech and conduct is protected by the First Amendment, but do liberals really now believe that the very few vendors who object to working at same-sex weddings should be forced to participate in what they believe to be a moral wrong?

For that matter, should a Native American printer be legally compelled to make posters with an Indian mascot that he finds offensive, or an environmentalist contractor to work a shift at a coal-fired power plant? Fining or otherwise coercing any small number of private citizens—who aren’t doing anyone real harm but entertain politically unacceptable thoughts—is thuggish stuff.

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A principle in quantum physics holds that everything not forbidden is mandatory, and social liberals seem intent on importing it into politics. But they may well come to regret this choice.

The movement for state recognition of same-sex marriages has succeeded in changing public opinion by appealing to people’s sympathy and values like love and acceptance. They will lose this good will if they adopt the illiberal standard that “equality” must mean stomping on religious liberty.

Correction: An earlier version of this editorial misstated where Apple Inc. has stores.