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.Pfft. Civil society? Intolerant leftists don't care about civil society. They care only about coerced conformity.
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...
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