The Reset Button.

Rod Dreher writes "Orthodox Christians Must Now Learn To Live as Exiles in Our Own Country."

No, the sky is not falling — not yet, anyway — but with the Supreme Court ruling constitutionalizing same-sex marriage, the ground under our feet has shifted tectonically. It is hard to overstate the significance of the Obergefell decision — and the seriousness of the challenges it presents to orthodox Christians and other social conservatives. Voting Republican and other failed culture war strategies are not going to save us now. . .

But when a Supreme Court majority is willing to invent rights out of nothing, it is impossible to have faith that the First Amendment will offer any but the barest protection to religious dissenters from gay rights orthodoxy. Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito explicitly warned religious traditionalists that this decision leaves them vulnerable. Alito warns that Obergefell “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” and will be used to oppress the faithful “by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”

The warning to conservatives from the four dissenters could hardly be clearer or stronger. So where does that leave us? For one, we have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist. To be frank, the court majority may impose on the rest of the nation a view widely shared by elites, but it is also a view shared by a majority of Americans. There will be no widespread popular resistance to Obergefell. This is the new normal.

For another, LGBT activists and their fellow travelers really will be coming after social conservatives. The Supreme Court has now, in constitutional doctrine, said that homosexuality is equivalent to race. The next goal of activists will be a long-term campaign to remove tax-exempt status from dissenting religious institutions. The more immediate goal will be the shunning and persecution of dissenters within civil society. . .

Obergefell is a sign of the times, for those with eyes to see. This isn’t the view of wild-eyed prophets wearing animal skins and shouting in the desert. It is the view of four Supreme Court justices, in effect declaring from the bench the decline and fall of the traditional American social, political, and legal order.

Dreher's solution is to accept it and pray. I'm certainly not going to gainsay the value of prayer, but the persecution of Christians (or Jews or any other religion for that matter) in the name of political correctness can and must be resisted, even if by force of arms. These people are going to be coming at us with the naked force of state violence. Such violence can and must be resisted, and not just with prayer. (I was talking with a friend on the phone just today and he can't believe that they are so stupid as to mess with people's fundamental religious beliefs, characterizing it as suicidal. I don't disagree.)

And I have news for our would-be oppressors. When you come at us with state violence to seize our churches, jail our pastors, you are going to lose because we will make it not worth your while to oppress us. And then, after we've won, we're going to press the reset button.

I was having this conversation with a reader the other day in reference to the firearm laws we are breaking in the various states and he asked me what we were going to do about previous infringements, going back to GCA 68 and the NFA of 1934. I told him, when they start the shooting we don't quit until we have pushed the reset button on the last 100 plus years of infringements. They lose it all -- the Federal Reserve, fiat currency, the income tax, all the gun laws, all the nanny state fascism, the murder of innocents on demand, the tortured rendering of the Interstate Commerce clause, the bloated federal bureaucracy, everything. EVERYTHING.

Our enemies will lie and say that we want to roll back the civil rights laws, put gays back in the closet and re-enslave black folks but that is a lie. We believe that the Constitution extends to everyone regardless of race, creed, color or religion -- BUT WITHOUT PREFERRED CLASSES. In our Constitutional Republic, some animals are NOT more equal than others. At this remove, nobody cares who diddles who as long as they are adults and can give consent. Most of us have become convinced libertarians on the drug war as well, because it only empowers two classes of criminal gangs -- the cartels and the imperial militarized federal government.

So when the reset button gets pushed in the aftermath of the tyrants' attacks and their defeat, they lose it all. Everything. Every tool of our oppression. This is something they should think about before they rouse their own people to righteous anger. They will lose everything they hold most dear -- their power over us, their position, their appetite for our liberty, our property and our lives. That is what "reset" means to them in the context of the civil war they are determined to have. Everything.