Religious liberty and the modern concept of sexual identity

Rod Dreher quotes Ben Domenech several times in a recent post titled, “Frightening The Horses”:

Ben Domenech calls it. Excerpt:

I think they have really been arguing against the rise of something which has a much larger impact than just a small number of homosexuals getting married — they have instead been arguing against the modern concept of sexual identity. And this is a much tougher task, considering how ingrained this concept has become in our lives.

During the sexual revolution, we crossed a line from sex being something you do to defining who you are. When it enters into that territory, we move beyond the possibility of having a society in which sex acts were tolerated, in the Mrs. Patrick Campbell sense — “I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses” — and one where it is insufficient to be anything but a cheerleader for sexual persuasion of all manner and type, because to be any less so is to hate the person themselves. Sex stopped being an aspect of a person, and became their lodestar — in much the same way religion is for others. As Walker Percy wrote, “Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.”

Domenech points out, correctly, that the problem with all this isn’t that gay people are living together as married. They always have been, and always will be. I don’t get out much, but I don’t know a single marriage traditionalist who lies awake in bed at night worried that somewhere, gay men and women in love are sharing quarters. The only really important questions in this debate are what this massive social shift in marriage and sexuality will mean for the family, and what it will mean for religious liberty when Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) orthodoxy on marriage is seen in law and by the mainstream opinion as hatred.

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