In post-America, "sensitivity toward other belief systems" is a one-way proposition

George Will's NRO column today is about how the dust-up over the Washington Redskins' name is simultaneously silly and chilling, but in the last few paragraphs, he ties it to a larger cultural phenomenon, and rightly so:

William Voegeli, a senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, writes that the kerfuffle over an NFL team’s name involves serious matters. They include comity in a diverse nation, civil discourse, and “not only how we make decisions, but how we decide what needs to be decided, and who will do the deciding.”

Time was, Voegeli writes, a tolerant society was one with “a mutual nonaggression pact”: If your beliefs and practices offend but do not otherwise affect me, I will not interfere with them if you will reciprocate regarding my beliefs and practices. Now, however, tolerance supposedly requires compulsory acknowledgment that certain people’s beliefs and practices deserve, Voegeli says, “to be honored, respected, affirmed, and validated” lest they suffer irreparable injury to their sense of worth. And it requires compelling conformity for the good of the compelled.

When two Oregon bakers chose, for religious reasons, not to provide a cake for a same-sex wedding, an Oregon government official explained why tolerance meant coercing the bakers: “The goal is to rehabilitate.” Tolerance required declaring the bakers’ beliefs and practices intolerable. We are going to discover whether a society can be congenial while its government is being coercive regarding wedding cakes and teams’ names.

It has occurred to me, in the days since federal district judge Richard Young, using some grotesque imitation of clear reasoning, found that Indiana's 2004 law reaffirming the millennia-old and exclusive component of the term "marriage"'s definition assuming union between men and women to be in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal-protection clause, that the biggest takeaway is this:  Henceforth, Christians are to zip it tight and be invisible in society.  Oh, mainline Protestant "churches" will be hanging rainbow flags for public display, but real adherence to Romans 1 now has the viability of the piles of books going up in flames in Germany circa 1933.

The stakes get higher in the war for America's soul by the hour now.

UPDATE:  Good grief.  Simon Waxman of the Boston Review pens a WaPo column saying that the US military needs to change the names of vehicles such as the Apache helicopter.

Veterans are none too pleased:

Readers at the popular military news gathering website Doctrine Man reacted Friday.

“I suspect that the author is less unhappy that our choppers have Indian names, and more unhappy that there is a U.S. military,” wrote Alex Kuhns.

Kevin Schooler wrote: “What floors me is that for the most part, it isn’t American Indians who are offended. It is guilt-ridden white liberals being offended on their behalf. How’s that for paternalism?”

Even the website’s moderator weighed in, saying that the names the military chooses for weapons platforms “are anything but derogatory, they convey strength, honor, and courage. @SimonWaxman is grossly uninformed.”

Conveyances of strength have no place in post-America.