“You know how to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to Hell.”

— Lindsey Graham

The problem with free speech is that it’s hard, and self-censorship is the path of least resistance. But, once you learn to keep yourself from voicing unwelcome thoughts, you forget how to think them—how to think freely at all—and ideas perish at conception.

George Packer, The Free-Speech Crisis – The New Yorker

A Catholic philosopher friend who thinks very deeply about these things says that we are deceiving ourselves if we think that appeals to religious liberty will protect us in the emerging order. Even if broad-minded liberals wanted to be tolerant and magnanimous, he says, the logic that leads to the discovery in the Constitution of gay civil rights will require intolerance of religious liberty, insofar as it impinges upon gay rights. This is because ideas have consequences, and the ontological and anthropological ideas that led to the moral and legal justification of same-sex marriage depose normative Christianity from the core of the culture’s understanding of itself.

via Rod Dreher
The Unraveling of the Common Good
The American Conservative
April 28, 2015

The Kulturkampf is over, people of faith lost, and it was pretty much inevitable. All that remains for people of faith to do is decide whether they want to assimilate, revolt, or find some modus vivendi that allows us to live according to the precepts of our faiths at a degree of remove from the wider society.