The price for a place at the table

Evangelical Christians are getting a lot of advice these days on politics from many quarters, but let me encapsulate what we're told:

"You can be part of the process, so long as you don't step on certain toes. You can oppose abortion, for instance, but any opposition to the organized homosexuality lobby will be regarded as 'bigotry,' and is off limits. If you want to remain in polite company, such as the good graces of the GOP, you will learn to shut up as homosexual activists radically redefine marriage, ply their message of acceptance to schoolchildren and construct 'hate-crime' laws designed to crush resistance."

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Some of this advice comes from commentators such as columnist Cal Thomas, himself an evangelical Christian, who periodically counsels other Christians to transfer their energies from politics to soup kitchens, and from liberals such as Ross Douthat, the Atlantic Monthly associate editor who recently used the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal to characterize Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "jowly bigots."

Tom Wolfe observed that in elite circles, anti-communism was once discouraged not so much through argument as the more effective method of casting it as bad etiquette. At cocktail parties, it was simply impolite to bring up communist carnage to counter the light-hearted support offered to Fidel Castro and other fashionable tyrants.

In his "Theocon Moment" column in the April 6 Wall Street Journal, Mr. Douthat uses the same tactic on evangelicals to deter them from openly opposing homosexual activism. He ridicules the attempt to enact a federal marriage amendment and cartoonishly depicts the evangelical response to the homosexual cultural onslaught as an obsession with "gay Teletubbies."

The message is clear: If you want respectability, don't dare work on a permanent solution to the ongoing assaults on marriage, and don't oppose the campaign to sell homosexuality as a lifestyle to children. We can mercilessly lampoon you into silence.

Never mind, for instance, that the creator of "Teletubbies" admitted in an interview that he deliberately costumed one of the male Tubbies as lavender, carrying a purse and wearing an upside-down triangle on his head (the symbol of gay liberation) to encourage toddlers to question their gender identity. Truth is no defense, it seems, when you cross the powerful homosexual lobby and its media allies.

In the face of such a one-sided battle, many people feel they can only watch as corporations and governments introduce policies that, in effect, turn traditional morality into a form of hatred.

In Philadelphia, 11 Christians who were singing hymns and sharing the Gospel during a homosexual street fair in 2004 were arrested and jailed. Five of them, including a 17-year-old girl, faced felony and misdemeanor charges adding up to a possible 47-year jail sentence under Pennsylvania's "hate-crimes" law. Prosecutors who openly mocked the Christians and described Bible verses as "hate" literature, refused to drop these baseless charges. Months later, a level-headed judge who viewed a videotape of the incident dismissed the case. But the message was clear: Buck the homosexual movement and you'll face intimidation from the authorities.

The state of California has gone so far as to enact a law that forces employers to subsidize homosexual domestic partners or lose any contracts with the state government. In other words, California is telling devout Christian, Jewish and Muslim employers that they must choose between God and Caesar. If you want to trade with your own government, you must subsidize what your faith informs you is sin. Aiding and abetting sin is sinful itself, but, hey, that's the employer's problem.

Fresh from passing a since-vetoed bill abolishing traditional marriage and replacing it with "any two people," California legislators are now moving ahead with a proposed law that will force middle and even elementary schools to include materials and speakers that promote homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism. The bill is so radical that it redefines gender as "gender identity and gender-related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person's assigned sex at birth."

Translated, this means that a confused little boy who wants to wear dresses to school must be encouraged to do so, and any teacher who tries to affirm the boy's masculinity will be subject to discipline. Plying children with sexual concepts beyond their ken used to be called corrupting the young. Now it's considered progressive education.

As evangelical Christians begin to understand that their place at the political table is contingent on surrendering their resistance to such radical policies, they will have to either excuse themselves from the process or work to change the configuration of that table.

Any attempt to do the latter will be regarded as bad manners. So be it. Jesus did not trim his theological sails in order to curry favor with the elites. In fact, He warned that for any who destroyed the innocence of children, "it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea" (Mathew 18:6).

The Revs. Robertson and Falwell should take heart. There are worse things than being called names.

Robert Knight is director of the Culture & Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America. Additionally, he is a draftsman of the federal Defense of Marriage Act and author of "The Age of Consent: The Rise of Relativism and the Corruption of Popular Culture" (Spence Publishing, 1998, 2000).