Patriotism, then, is not about conforming oneself to the state, nor is it about encouraging the state to conform itself to the majority. It is rather about advocating tirelessly for the state to conform itself to the truth.

I thought about this in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, especially when a friend alerted me that the editors of The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, PA, had declared, within minutes of the announcement of the decision: “As a result of Friday’s ruling, PennLive/The Patriot-News will no longer accept, nor will it print, op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage.”

In a tweet later in the morning, the paper’s Editorial and Opinions Editor John L. Micek (until recently a state capitol reporter—yikes!) explained himself curtly: “This is not hard: We would not print racist, sexist or anti-Semitic letters. To that, we add homophobic ones. Pretty simple.”

On the one hand, this move is yet another example of the false analogy between the Civil Rights Movement and the LGBT movement.