They call themselves the “New Civil Rights Movement.” In reality, that’s not a movement, but a group blog edited by David Badash, father of the Great Nationwide Kiss-In, a gay-rights protest. But the name speaks to an ambition, and to a rhetoric: that discrimination against homosexuals, from the criminalization of sexual acts to the queasiness that same-sex marriage causes in some people, is to be understood as the moral equivalent of the oppression of African Americans and should be extirpated with the same energy; that harboring reservations about the moral status of homosexuality or the social desirability of gay marriage should be the social equivalent of dropping an infamous racial slur into conversation.
As Governor Mike Pence and the people of Indiana are discovering, that is a powerful rhetorical strategy. Indiana has enacted a state-level version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton after passing Congress with widespread (nearly unanimous, in fact) bipartisan support. The RFRA has been deployed against the so-called Affordable Care Act, notably in the Hobby Lobby case, and so is regarded among progressives as an expression of right-wing atavism. In reality, one of the few votes against the RFRA was from Senator Jesse Helms, the personification of congressional conservatism, who worried that prisoners would use RFRA protections to make mischief; some conservative drug warriors disliked that the bill was brought into existence partly to carve out a legal exception for peyote use in Indian religious ceremonies.
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