Hearing impassioned pleas for gay rights during Oscars, Mark Silk saw no hope for last week's well-propose compromise:
Well meaning as it is, the proposal advanced by David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch in a NYT op-ed yesterday seems to me a half-way house that will have trouble standing. But the cry of distress from Rod Dreher about the "fast erosion of religious liberty in America" paints with far too broad a brush. It's not religious liberty that is fast eroding, but one big social norm.
Passionately felt social norms die unquiet deaths, as Silk suggests. Indeed, when their change is mirrored in shifting legal rights, they are fought out in public debate, through the halls of legislatures and in the courts. On this issue Silk predicts, and we agree, a future of pitched civil and legal battles.
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