Our quest for tolerance has backfired

When Judge Neil Gorsuch was being grilled by the Democrats and hugged by the Republicans last week, one of the recurring themes in the interrogations was his views on religious freedom. The senators focused on his concurrence in the Hobby Lobby case, where he held that a company should not be compelled to provide birth control in violation of its owners spiritual beliefs, and on his dissent from the majority in the Little Sisters of the Poor case which did the exact opposite: Force nuns to foot the bill for the pill.

It was interesting theater to watch the Democrats try and paint Judge Gorsuch as a religious zealot in sheep’s clothing, criticizing his reliance on precedent and on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

In an earlier column, I noted how there was a strong strain of anti-Catholicism evident in the way that some Lower Merion residents reacted to the horrific prospect of having large stone crosses placed at either end of a bridge spanning two sides of Villanova University. That column elicited the predictable amount of emails saying Christians are in the majority, stop whining, and by the way Christine, you do know you support cannibalism?

But it clearly isn’t just Catholics who have to deal with prejudice. Christians in general are social pariahs on many issues and occasions, especially when we’re dealing with sexuality. That has become painfully evident in the whole series of “bathroom” debates, touching upon privacy, tolerance and hard science.

Last week, the Boyertown Area School District was sued on behalf of a young male student who was forced to share the boy’s bathroom with a biological female who apparently identified as male. Represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Independence Law Center, the unnamed student was upset when the transgender classmate came into his locker room and started undressing.

You might be thinking that religion is not necessarily at issue in this controversy, because you don’t have to be a person of faith to believe that biology is not a figment of the imagination, science is real, boys and girls really are anatomically different and privacy is important. After all, the “right to privacy” is the keystone of that most progressive of all Supreme Court decisions, the one that allows a mother to kill her child in utero.

But if you listen to the reaction of the LGBT community, the enemy is the proud, identifiable conservative Christian who thinks that there are actual moral absolutes, and evils, in society.

One of those absolutes is the importance of protecting children and promoting their privacy rights. That idea of “privacy” is something that secular progressives should embrace wholeheartedly, since entire social movements have been built on it.

And yet, according to LGBT activists like Eliza Byard of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, cisgender, straight, white, majority students like the one in Boyertown don’t have any privacy rights. She suggested that instead of inconveniencing the trans student, a member of a very small minority group, it would be better to make a special accommodation for the boy who simply wants to put his underwear on without making a political statement.

The world is upside down when the privacy of a boy is subordinated to the comfort of a girl who thinks she’s a boy. This is madness, people. We might never get back to that period of time when people regularly said prayers before meals and meant it, or when wearing a crucifix on air was considered normal, not offensive, or where erecting stone crosses on private, Catholic property wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

We have moved too far into the Age of Tolerance where acceptance of everything is a hallmark of intelligence, and honest expressions of unpopular views is considered a hate crime.

As Archbishop Chaput wrote in his book, “Strangers in a Strange Land,” “People who hold a classic understanding of sexuality, marriage and family have gone in just twenty years from pillars of mainstream conviction to the media equivalent of racists and bigots.”

To twist gender, nature, science, the law and philosophy itself into a narcissistic platform for self-actualization (aka “equality”) might make us more tolerant. But the things it forces us to tolerate will ultimately make us unworthy of inheritors of the earth.