Culture news: Homosexual marriage and the threat to freedom of religion

Ben Domenech has written a piece in which he argues that one result of the sexual revolution has been that people now define themselves on the basis of the sexuality, much as Christians define themselves on the basis of faith in Christ:

"During the sexual revolution, we crossed a line from sex being something you do to defining who you are. When it enters into that territory, we move beyond the possibility of having a society in which sex acts were tolerated, in the Mrs. Patrick Campbell sense – "I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses" – and one where it is insufficient to be anything but a cheerleader for sexual persuasion of all manner and type, because to be any less so is to hate the person themselves. Sex stopped being an aspect of a person, and became their lodestar – in much the same way religion is for others."

He goes on to point to the real issue raised by the approach of homosexual marriage:

"No, the real problem with gay marriage is that the nature of the marriage union is inherently entwined in the future of the first line of the Bill of Rights: our right to religious liberty. Orthodox believers of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faiths were slow to understand this. I'm talking about something much bigger here than the discrimination lawsuits brought across the country against bakers and photographers: I'm talking about whether churches will be able to function as public entities in an era where their views on sin, particularly sexual sin, are in direct conflict with not just opinion but the law – and proselytizing those views from the pulpit or in the public square will be viewed as using the protection of religious expression to protect hateful speech."