That’s the subtitle of Jonathan Last’s outstanding cover article—“You Will Be Assimilated”—in the new issue of the Weekly Standard. For those who haven’t been paying attention, Last shows that “the same-sex marriage movement is interested in a great deal more than just the freedom to form marital unions”:
It is also interested, quite keenly, in punishing dissenters. But the ambitions of the movement go further than that, even. It’s about revisiting legal notions of freedom of speech and association, constitutional protections for religious freedom, and cultural norms concerning the family.
Last asks: “Remember when proponents of same-sex marriage mocked people who suggested that creating a right to same-sex ‘marriage’ might weaken the institution of marriage itself?” He points out that candid gay activists acknowledge that non-monogamy is rampant in gay marriages and that the marriage redefinition they are seeking will undermine the norm of marital monogamy (a point that the New York Times has also made). Further:
Remember when people who predicted that gay marriage would lead to polygamy were mocked as dolts and yokels? Well now it turns out that polygamy is just the next frontier.
Last continues:
[T]he same-sex marriage campaign is far from over. It hasn’t even reached the point of consolidating its gains. Rather, it is still in its aggressive expansion phase. Next up on the docket are transgender rights—even before Caitlyn Jenner, it was hard to go a week without a transgender story on the front page of either the New York Times or the Washington Post—and polyamory. Then the push to bring religious organizations—schools, charities, and para-church groups—to heel will intensify. Already, Catholic Charities has been driven out of adoption and foster care in places like Illinois, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia because that organization doesn’t place children in same-sex households. (Tellingly, this rebuff has been deemed not a regrettable by-product of the gay-marriage movement, but a victory for it. The goal is not live-and-let-live.) Then will come the big fight over breaking the churches themselves.
All in the name of tolerance, of course.