In London’s Telegraph, there’s an article headed “America is changing at light speed — I can hardly keep up.” The subheading is, “Soon we Britons might have to start revising our notions of crazy, gun-lovin’, God-fearing America.”

If a country is gun-loving or God-fearing, does that make it crazy? To many, the answer is yes.

Evidently pumped by recent changes in America, the Telegraph writer asks,

So what’s next? These kinds of changes are notoriously hard to predict, but I’d point to religion as an area where America’s fundamentalist foundations are beginning to crack.
Nominally, 70 per cent of Americans still believe in God, but that is down from 90 per cent a decade ago, and church attendances are falling fast.

For many, this will be cause for rejoicing. They will hail, as the Telegrapher does, a “newly progressive USA.”

I have often spoken of the sheer speed of things in America. Longtime readers will have to bear with me (with the repetition, that is).

I remember that, almost overnight, smoking was stigmatized. (This was long after the surgeon general’s warning.) Smoking was suddenly uncool, practically verboten. Those who still smoked were something like pariahs.

Cigarettes were airbrushed out of mouths on postage stamps!

This stigmatization will never happen to alcohol, I imagine, and it probably won’t happen to pot: Those things remain cool. But I saw smoking absolutely turned on.

Give you another thing: One day, Jesse Jackson held a press conference and announced, Henceforward, we will be known as “African Americans.” No more “black.” (For the benefit of young people, I should say that Reverend Jackson was once a big, big deal in American life — known as “the President of Black America.” Then he was supplanted by Al Sharpton and others.)

People turned on a dime — at least a good many of them did, and many more would follow. I remember people around me that very week trying out the new phrase on their tongue: African American. It didn’t fit very neatly there. It was foreign, awkward. But they were determined, and would get the hang of it.

Last week, I read that Bubba Watson, the golf star, was painting over the Confederate flag on the top of his Dukes of Hazzard car. (He bought the car that was used on the very show.) He will replace the Stars & Bars with the Stars & Stripes. Good!

Right?

Listen, I have no brief for the Confederate flag, to put it mildly. But I may have less of a brief for the herd mentality, and the kind of social panic that is characteristic of this country.

By the way, there are a helluva lot of Che Guevara T-shirts in the streets. When are they going away? When will they be stigmatized? When will that face be replaced by, say, the face of Armando Valladares, Oscar Biscet, or some other Cuban human-rights hero?

If you live long enough, you realize that today’s right-wing alarmism is tomorrow’s ruthlessly enforced norm. Some years ago, when people were touting civil unions, right-wingers would raise the prospect of marriage — gay marriage — and the civil unionists would say, “You alarmists and scaremongers! No one’s talking about marriage, for heaven’s sake! You would really deny a person the right to visit his loved one in the hospital? Or to leave him his estate? What kind of monster are you?”

Two seconds later, if you supported civil unions and not gay marriage, you were . . . well, a monster. A Klansman. It was so fast.

A law school in Canada has just been denied accreditation because it has traditional views, or once-traditional views, on morality, including sexual morality. (The law school is private and Christian, but the withholding of accreditation is a fatal blow. Its graduates couldn’t practice.)

In Oregon, Aaron and Melissa Klein have been ordered to pay $135,000 because they refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. The relevant state official had said that he was out to “rehabilitate” them. (In Vietnam, they used the word “reeducate.”)

The errant couple — meaning the Kleins — received death threats on their children, natch. This is the way it seems to go in the “newly progressive USA,” as our Telegraph friend put it.

Over in Northern Ireland, a customer demanded that a bakery provide a cake with a slogan on it: “Support Gay Marriage.” The bakers, obviously monsters, balked. They said that their religious views forbade the promotion of such a cause. They are now in a legal morass, with the courts ruling against them.

Today, it seems stupid — it seems like right-wing alarmism — to suppose that churches will eventually be forced to perform gay weddings, or else. But a lot that seems stupid today is absolute orthodoxy tomorrow.

Did you ever think that a couple would receive death threats on their children, and be pushed toward bankruptcy, if they declined to bake a cake for a gay wedding? Did you really? Then you have a better imagination than I do — although mine is being stretched all the time.