The Federalist HT Joe Carter

What is at stake here for them here is a right to have access, as customers, to any business without encountering its owners’ moral reservations about same-sex marriage or homosexuality.

Their demand makes sense only because it has become important to activists to extract from the unwilling the confession of the rightness of the homosexual life and the wrongness of expressing any reservation about it.

The problem heightens when we consider how exactly we would identify the people to be protected. In a brief to the Supreme Court last year, Paul McHugh of the medical school at Johns Hopkins noted how unstable is the category of “sexual orientation.” People shift in and out of these “orientations” all the time. McHugh noted that “a 10-year study of 79 non-heterosexual women …in 2008, reported that 67 percent changed their identity at least once, and 36 percent changed their identity more than once.” Some people have the “orientation,” but seldom if ever act upon it.

At the ground of it all is finally the question of just why it is wrong for people to cast an adverse judgment on the homosexual life. At first we were told that these were simply matters of personal taste, that we should no more judge the character of a person by his style of sexuality than by his preference for peanut butter over coq au vin. But if it is simply a matter of taste, the demand for acceptance is amply met by the report that “that is a taste we don’t happen to share.”

Yet, as we’ve seen, the argument that began with the wrongness of casting judgments on matters of taste moved on, in its momentum, to casting the most severe judgments on those who would cast judgments! What has not been explained, even now, is why it is wrong to cast moral judgment on sexual styles, whether heterosexual or homosexual.

What I am arguing, then, is that this issue, suddenly flaring in Indiana and the country, and inflated with the most bizarre charges against the religious, could be deflated, with the moral outrage drained, if we simply challenged directly the claim that drives it all: that it is deeply wrongful to cast judgments on the way people act out their sexual lives, warranting a ban on all discriminations based on “sexual orientation.”