Obergefell and the New Gnosticism

First Things

It’s not that the New Gnostics are an especially vindictive bunch. It’s that a certain kind of coercion is built into their view from the start. If your most valuable, defining core just is the self that you choose to express, there can be no real difference between you as a person, and your acts of self-expression; I can’t affirm you and oppose those acts. Not to embrace self-expressive acts is to despise the self those acts express. I don’t simply err by gainsaying your sense of self. I deny your existence, and do you an injustice. For the New Gnostic, then, a just society cannot live and let live, when it comes to sex. Sooner or later, the common good—respect for people as self-defining subjects—will require social approval of their self-definition and -expression.

Again, none of these effects came by force of law from Obergefell. But they are all of a piece with the New Gnosticism and its inherent coerciveness. We’ll see more of its effects in the near future. We’ll see more parties enlisting courts in the unfolding coercion, by deploying the perfectly tailored concept of dignitary harm: the pain of being told by others that your choices are immoral. Legal academics have argued that this sort of harm strikes at the heart of the common good, and that judges should count it against the moral and religious liberty claims of those seeking to avoid complicity with others’ sins.

The First Church of Secularism and the Sexual Revolution by Mary Eberstadt

 

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