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The Bigot's Lament
http://www.thenation.com/article/178820/bigots-lament
Opponents of Senate Bill 1062 at the Arizona Capitol, Phoenix, February 21 (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Whether talking secession, hoarding bitcoin or refusing to expand Medicaid, the American right these days is obsessed with opting out of a society that its members increasingly see as an assault on their way of life. Their latest attempt to liberate themselves from the polity was Arizona’s SB 1062, a bill that would have exempted individuals and businesses from state law if it burdened their exercise of religion. The legislation did not single out lesbians and gays, but it was plainly motivated by anti-gay animus. Recognizing as much, corporations like Apple, AT&T and Intel, as well as the Super Bowl Host Committee, condemned the measure, and the threat of a statewide boycott prompted the state’s Chamber of Commerce to go to “DefCon 1” against it. Critics also pointed out that the bill was gratuitous; it’s already legal in Arizona to refuse to do business with gay customers. All of which was enough to convince Republican Governor Jan Brewer to veto the bill on February 26.
This turn of events has merely reinforced the Christian right’s conviction that it is they who are the victims of, as Michele Bachmann put it, “a terrible intolerance.” At The New York Times, house conservative Ross Douthat foresees a kind of anti-Christian Hunger Games in which the defeated religious right waits “to find out what settlement the victors will impose.” And what exactly will this reaping entail? Homophobes will be “marginalized” and “encouraged to conform.” Religiously affiliated schools and agencies will be required to follow the same laws as everyone else or forfeit their tax-exempt status. Christian businesses will be forced to bake cakes and make bouquets for gay weddings—and what could be a worse fate for someone who specializes in the comely arrangement of frosting or flowers? Douthat casts all of this as a fait accompli, magicked into existence by the Supreme Court and a bit of vicious fairy power. And while he claims he doesn’t mean to sound “self-pitying”—“nobody should call it persecution,” he writes—that is, of course, precisely what he intends.
So why can’t gays accept a polite culture war truce by letting “the dissenters opt out”?
First, the forces behind Arizona’s SB 1062 don’t just want to be left alone to exalt heterosexual marriages. The Alliance Defending Freedom, the Scottsdale-based group that helped draft the bill, opposes same-sex marriage, gay parenting and adoption, and abortion in all cases. It filed an amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas arguing that gay sodomy should remain a crime. More recently, it provided counsel to Yelena Mizulina, one of the legislators behind Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law, and spent over $1.5 million last year on “human rights legal work” for groups outside the United States. If the Alliance had its way, gays and lesbians would be a globally criminalized people, hounded from public life both by private discrimination and the state police apparatus.
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Mornin', sunshine! 
