Ever ready to strike a blow for inclusion and tolerance, seven homeowners on the Chevy Chase street where vice-president-elect Mike Pence found his transitional residence have shown their displeasure with him, his ideas and perhaps his existence by flying the rainbow flag of the gay rights agenda, in a show of defiance or pique.
They might have done better to have brought him a nice plate of cookies, as it is to them and their allies that he owes his new title: if it was the Rust Belt implosion that fueled the Trump rise it was the aggression shown by the cultural left in its punitive phase that ran it a close second, as it morphed from an urge for inclusion to a demand for submission that trampled all things in its way.
In 2014, Brendan Eich, the chief operating officer of Mozilla, was forced to resign because in 2008 he had given money to a group that supported traditional marriage, which was then the official world view of the Clintons and our liberal president. “Florists, bakers…pharmacists and pizza parlor owners found themselves the object of two-minute hate campaigns,” as Mark Hemingway tells us, and a couple in Oregon lost their business and were forced to pay a fine of $135,000 for declining to bake a cake for a lesbian ceremony, though they offered to bake anything else for an occasion less freighted. And nothing said “overreach” more than the victory lap after the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision in 2015, with the losers told that they were “on the wrong side of history,” and doomed to irrelevance before very long.
“History teaches two lessons about culture wars,” the Federalist said at the moment, one being that the side seen as “winning” overplays its advantage; the other that the American people tend to oppose the aggressor, pumping the brakes on the runaway vehicle that is going too fast and too far. Sure enough, among the losers on November 8 was Brad Avakian, Democrat, the labor commissioner who had levied the punitive fine on the bakers, and hoped to use it to run for higher state office. He lost, definitively, the one Democrat in 14 years to lose a bid for state office in Oregon, a state Hillary Clinton would win by ten points.
Is there a way to balance the right of the religious to follow their principles with the right of gay people to wed? As it happens, there is: We don’t force a priest, rabbi, or minister to conduct a wedding ceremony for an interfaith couple if it offends his convictions, but we don’t allow the clerics to stop the couple from being married by somebody else. The right to be married does not mean the right to be married by one particular person, if other people are ready and willing to do it, and it would cause that one person some pain.
Decency requires it, as does “tolerance,” which is the willingness to grant breathing room to many different descriptions of people with whom we may not always or often agree; the perquisite for peace in a diverse society, and the one way a country like ours can survive. We hope gay couples and evangelical bakers can tolerate one another. We hope Mike Pence will enjoy his new life in government housing, and his old neighbors will come to understand their fatuity. We hope they enjoy the Trump administration, and the judges he’ll name, which will enrage them still further. We hope it will teach them the value of tolerance. But somehow we doubt that it will.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
