The necessity of making a binary choice in fractured post-America

As you're surely aware, two southern states have recently been in the news regarding their respective ways of dealing with the cultural rot caused by the sexual revolution - one in a cowardly fashion (Georgia), and one in a courageous fashion (North Carolina).

Let's juxtapose two takes on these developments, one based on the assumption that the near-total secularization of post-America is something to be celebrated, and that remaining forces opposing it are not only a nuisance to the overall society, but also assuring their own obsolescence, and the other stating forthrightly that the LGBT movement is a cult that will not stop until this nation's moral and spiritual foundation is obliterated.

The first take comes to us from Frank Bruni at the NYT:

[North Carolina Governor Pat Mccrory] hastily signed a sweeping anti-gay and anti-transgender law that was rushed through the State Legislature as if the state’s security and economy were in immediate peril.
It takes forever in this country to build a new bridge, tunnel or train line, but it took no time flat for politicians in the Tar Heel State to convene a special session, formally ostracize North Carolina’s L.G.B.T. voters and wrap conservative Christians in a tight embrace. Who says America’s can-do spirit is dead?
What happened in North Carolina is a problem for Republicans atop the major trouble (Cruz, Donald Trump) that they already had. It exposes divides within the party that are ever more difficult to paper over and contradictions that aren’t easy to explain away.
While the marriage of the party’s evangelical and business wings has never been a cuddly one, it’s especially frosty now, their incompatible desires evident in the significant number of prominent corporations that have denounced the North Carolina law and that successfully pressed the Republican governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal, to veto recent legislation that would have permitted the denial of services to L.G.B.T. people by Georgians citing religious convictions.
Corporations want to attract and retain the most talented workers, and that’s more difficult in states with discriminatory laws. They want to reach the widest base of customers and sow loyalty among young consumers in particular, and the best strategy for that is an L.G.B.T.-friendly one, given that eight in 10 Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 support non-discrimination laws, according to a 2015 Public Religion Research Institute survey.
So they’re increasingly at loggerheads with the G.O.P., whose gay-rights advocates are still in the minority and whose socially conservative members still profit from and promote a derisive view of gays.
The gay-rights front isn’t the only one on which there’s tension between the party and big business. The Republican primaries are awash in anti-immigrant sentiment and screed; corporate America generally backs immigration reform. The protectionism and nativism that have had such currency in the contest so far conflict with many corporations’ interests.
What’s more, several major companies are so concerned about the brew of misogyny, racism and xenophobia stirred up by Trump that they are debating whether to follow through with their usual sponsorship of the Republican National Convention, as The Times’s Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman reported last week.
THE party’s anti-gay efforts not only undermine its pro-business stance but also contradict conservatives’ exaltation of local decision making. The North Carolina law was drafted and passed expressly to undo and override an ordinance in the state’s most populous city, Charlotte, that extended L.G.B.T. protections against discrimination to transgender people who want to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity. The law went so far as to forbid any municipality from instituting its own anti-discrimination protections, lest they contradict the state’s.
Apparently conservatives love the concept of local control when the locality being given control tilts right, but they have a different view when it leans left. Rural sensibilities must be defended while cosmopolitan ones are dismissed.
North Carolina harbors both. Its tensions are America’s in miniature, and in terms of gay rights, they’re a reminder that the Supreme Court’s ruling last June to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide was hardly the finish of the fight.
That ruling was certain to prompt the kind of backlash now occurring in North Carolina, Georgia and elsewhere, because the steadily growing majority of Americans who favor gay equality is not yet overwhelming, and the climate of acceptance changes greatly from state to state and county to county.
Too many of us L.G.B.T. Americans and our allies were too busy celebrating to stay alert to that. Too few of us acknowledged the tenaciousness of opponents who will resort to whatever they must, including the hallucinated specter of male sexual predators entering women’s restrooms, to sweep aside anti-discrimination laws that include us and to turn public sentiment against us.

They will lose in the end — whether that’s 10, 20 or 30 years from now. Meanwhile they’ll do undeniable harm to the Republican Party nationally and force tough, coalition-straining choices upon it.

They’ll also steal oxygen from matters more central to this country’s continued vitality and prosperity.

Look, I used to be a restaurant critic. I know dessert is important. But if you want to make America great again, you can’t waste time worrying about who’s cutting the wedding cake. 

Notice how he drives home the meme that his ilk wants to make into a universal assumption - namely, that you have to go along with the obliteration of not only traditional sexual morality, but heretofore universally understood definitions of gender as a matter of economic development. That's why every town and city up and down the pike is passing "human rights" ordinances. That's how you court new businesses.

Now for the perspective offered by Fay Voshell at The American Thinker:

Over a period of a few decades, activists for the LGBT movement transitioned steadily from their initial demands for equal protection under the law to demands for gay marriage, to denaturing the very construct of humanity by insisting on a gender free society, to promoting the right to force society at large to accept as infallible an individual’s ability to discern and to declare one’s self to be whatever sex one chooses.

To put it another way, the LGBT agenda will brook no contradiction from the rest of us mere mortals to argue about the inerrant inner light of the gods and goddesses who declare themselves to have divine ability to transform themselves into any sex they wish to be. The “right” to be or not to be man or woman resulted in the fanatical demand that bathrooms must be retrofitted to conform to “gender free” standards, meaning that in practice either sex could use public facilities as they wished, including those who are physically men but believe themselves to be women.

But even victories in the bathroom bill fights have not been enough for radicals. Encouraged by the recent decision of the Supreme Court ratifying a pillar of the LGBT movement; namely, the constitutional “right” of same sex couples to marry, the movement has set its sights on destroying Christianity itself. By insisting that no minister or priest can refuse to marry gay couples, and by asserting no organization or institution, including churches, can refuse to hire people diametrically opposed to Christian beliefs, the LGBT movement reveals itself to be a cult radically and viciously antithetical to Christianity.

And, yes, it is a cult.

A basic definition of a cult is an organization whose beliefs are so far separated from the real world, that if society were to incorporate those beliefs, it too, would go mad. Therefore, insane beliefs completely divorced from the ground of being can only be established by force of law and strategies utilizing persecution aimed at eventual elimination of entities in opposition to those beliefs.

The result is that open war has been declared on Christianity in America.

For proof of that war, we need only to look at the mad consequences we now observe in Georgia, where the governor of that state has vetoed a bill that would have offered absolutely minimal protection to ministers and churches. World Magazine reports:

“Claiming the bill would ‘give rise to state-sanctioned discrimination,’ Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal today vetoed a law that would have provided legal protection for pastors, faith-based organizations, and business owners who, in good conscience, refused to service gay weddings. The veto leaves Georgians with no statewide religious liberty protection and vulnerable to lawsuits over belief in the biblical definition of marriage.”

Apparently completely ignorant of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution’s clear statement of religious protection, the governor added: “In light of our history, I find it ironic that today some in the religious community feel it necessary to ask government to confer upon them certain rights and protections.”

Let that sink in.

In an era in which our Secretary of State has finally admitted genocide is being committed against unprotected Christians in the Middle East, the governor of Georgia says religious communities don’t need the government to confer rights and protections on people of faith.

Irony of ironies, Nathan Deal is a Southern Baptist -- a Southern Baptist who just gave over his own denomination to corporations for thirty pieces of silver. That his own church holds such retrograde and discriminatory positions as marriage being a covenant between a man and a woman and that the scriptures hold very pronounced views on sexual behavior seem to come as a surprise to Governor Deal.

But they do not surprise Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Seminary, and stalwart defender of orthodox Christian views on the sexes and marriage. One wonders if Deal -- what a perfect name -- is prepared to see Dr. Mohler sued and hauled away to jail for advocacy of orthodox Christian doctrine concerning marriage and sexual mores.

Certainly Deal’s capitulation to corporations and the LGBT radicals helps explain why a plurality of Georgian evangelicals, among them Southern Baptists, voted for shameless secularist Donald Trump. Apparently neither Deal nor the plurality of so-called evangelicals think faith and Christian doctrine have anything to say about the character of candidates who wish to lead a nation or about radical policies antithetical to and aimed directly at Christians.

You couldn't ask for two more divergent viewpoints.

We may be hopelessly fractured as a nation, but that is no excuse for not taking sides.

God or the Devil. Simple as that.