It sprang up fast and had no real roots reaching back into history

One aspect of the current firestorm over the Indiana religious-freedom law is the unprecedented pace at which the entire question of gays and society has evolved from where it stood circa 1970 to now.

It was refreshing to see that Ross Douthat at the New York Times has been thinking about this as well:

 . . . the definition of “common sense” and “compromise” on these issues has shifted so rapidly in such a short time: Positions taken by, say, the president of the United States and most Democratic politicians a few short years ago are now deemed the purest atavism, the definition of bigotry gets more and more elastic, and developments that social liberals would have described as right-wing scare stories in 2002 or so are now treated as just the most natural extensions of basic American principles. (Rod Dreher calls this the “law of merited impossibility,” in which various follow-on effects of same-sex marriage are dismissed as impossible until they happen, at which point it’s explained that of course they were absolutely necessary.) Of course all of this is happening because underlying attitudes have changed rapidly, and what’s politically and socially possible is changing with them; that’s all understandable. But the pace involved is unusual, and its rapidity makes it very easy to imagine that scenarios that aren’t officially on the table right now will become plausible very, very soon.

Let’s just take the issue at stake in the Indiana/religious liberty debate. Beneath all of the to-and-fro-ing over what the law actually says, whether it differs from other statutes like it, and so on, lies a basic reality that both sides can concede. The support for new state RFRAs from religious conservative has been occasioned by a handful of cases in which people in the wedding industry (photographers, florists, etc.) have been sued or fined or otherwise sanctioned for trying to decline to provide their services for a same-sex ceremony. The current conservative position (though one that the Republican Party’s business wing is eager to abjure) is 

is that a religious exemption of some sort is a reasonable compromise between gay rights and freedom of religion/freedom of association; the current liberal position (with a few exceptions) is that granting private businesses the right to decline involvement in same-sex nuptials is the moral and legal equivalent of allowing businesses to turn away African-Americans from lunch counters.

That liberal position, is, of course, preposterous, but there is one aspect of the attempted parallel that must enter into our considerations:

 . . . both Jim Crow and the means we used to destroy it are, well, legally and culturally extraordinary. So if our current situation with same-sex marriage and religious conservatives really is analogous, there is no obvious reason why we’ve reached any kind stopping point once the florists and bakers have been appropriately fined or closed down. 

Douthat then poses some questions we'll have to look at as things go forward, and it's worth your time to ponder them.

One last matter: On Bret Baier's FNC show last evening, Jonah Goldberg said that homosexual "marriage" is such a done deal in our society that the firestorm over the Indiana law really amounts to a case of "shooting the wounded."

I refuse to believe that.  You should, too.

For the sake of our civilization, we must reject that kind of resignation.