The Illiberal Right Throws a Tantrum
A faction of the religious right has concluded that if liberal democracy does not guarantee victory, then it must be abandoned
By Adam Serwer
By the tail end of the Obama administration, the culture war seemed lost. The religious right sued for detente, having been swept up in one of the most rapid cultural shifts in generations. Gone were the decades of being able to count on attacking its traditional targets for political advantage. In 2013, Chuck Cooper, the attorney defending California’s ban on same-sex marriage, begged the justices to allow same-sex marriage opponents to lose at the ballot box rather than in court. Conservatives like George Will and Rod Dreher griped that LGBT activists were “sore winners,” intent on imposing their beliefs on prostrate Christians who, after all, had already been defeated.
The rapidity of that cultural shift though, should not obscure the contours of the society that the religious right still aspires to preserve: a world where women have no control over whether to carry a pregnancy to term, same-sex marriage is illegal, and gays and lesbians can be arrested and incarcerated for having sex in their own homes and be barred from raising children. The religious right showed no mercy and no charity toward these…
