Why we call them jackboots - today's edition

Much important and well-expressed commentary pointing out that the intolerance in and about Indiana is coming from the Left has been written in the last few days, and I may link to more of it, but for now, in light of the Memories Pizza development, I want to dray your attention to today's column by Heather Wilhelm. She spells out the confluence of forces arrayed against us with striking clarity:

It has become increasingly clear that the Indiana blow-up has nothing to do with the details of any law. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar may not realize it, but he pretty much wrote the “Stairway to Heaven” of opinion columns: The true message is there, but only if you read it backwards. The New Sharia isn’t coming from powerful and intolerant Christians. It’s coming from the activist left, closely allied with big business and government. It’s a coalition that, increasingly, will not tolerate dissent of any kind.

Conservative Christians, it appears, can’t just live and let live when it comes to gay marriage. They have to actively support and participate in it, lest the “You Must Approve” coalition swoop in and try to ruin their business, their reputation, and their life. This is sad. It is strange. It certainly reflects a stunning insecurity. It’s also happening across the country: For refusing to participate in same-sex weddings, an Oregon bakery was shuttered, a Washington florist may lose her business, and photography studios, wedding venues and t-shirt shops have been targeted with closure, fines, and crippling legal bills.

You might think religious objections to gay marriage are silly or outdated. You might even think that people who decline to serve gay weddings are misguided jerks. That’s your right; it’s a free country, at least for now. Personally, I think most religious objections to gay marriage are understandable and reasonable, not “bigoted.” On the same token, if any of my gay friends want me to bake a cake for their wedding, I’ll bake the best darn wedding cake this side of Gene Hackman. (Actually, that’s a lie. I would probably do what I usually do in social occasions that require the bringing of food, which would be to buy something at a fancy store and pretend that I made it myself.)

But then again, I value freedom and diversity. The New Sharia does not. In fact, many Americans seem to have lost a basic understanding of how freedom works. Remember high school civics class, where Lesson One is that your First Amendment rights don’t really exist unless they are also applied to people whose ideas you might find wrong, even abhorrent? Something tells me they don’t teach that anymore. 

As I say, I may link to some other great pieces I've come across in the last couple of days.  I probably would have done so anyway, but situated as I am in the city where Cummins is headquartered, which is also Mike Pence's hometown, I have suffered from a bit of culture-war overload. No small part of it has come from my own column about it all, which appeared in yesterday's edition of The Republic, the city's newspaper.  (Behind a paywall, or I'd link.)

But threats to burn down a pizzeria, and hacking its website.   This is Krisallnacht-level stuff.

Post-America is one grim place.