I was not at the time, and still am not, a lawyer, but I wrote in 2008 that social conservatives ought to be putting their money, their strategizing, and their public activism behind building some kind of legal firewall to protect religious liberty once SSM becomes the law of the land. It was my guess that most Americans who favor SSM don’t want to punish churches and religious charities who disagree. We should appeal to them while they still exist.

(Incidentally, by no means do I believe this irenic view is held by all pro-SSM folks. For some, it is not enough that gay couples gain the right to marry; religious “bigots” must be made to suffer, as payback. You hear this week that conservatives could have had peace with the SSM movement if only they had granted civil unions a few years ago, but they refused. Anybody who believes that revisionist nonsense need only look at California, where gay couples had civil unions, and all the legal benefits of marriage, without calling it marriage. That wasn’t good enough. They wanted it all, because to deny it all would be to give some quarter to Bigotry, and we can’t have that.)

The bottom line is that we are fast reaching a place in which before the law, churches that adhere to traditional religious teaching on homosexuality in practice will have the same status under federal civil rights laws as racist churches. Religious conservatives may argue that discrimination against homosexuals is not the same thing as racial discrimination, because there is, in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic teaching, a moral aspect to sexual behavior that is not present in race — they can argue this, and they would be correct, but nobody cares, because the culture in general is coming to accept that there is no particular moral status inherent in homosexual behavior. Nor, for that matter, in most heterosexual behavior.