The title “prophet” isn’t on my business card, but you don’t need to be a prophet — just a student of history — to have predicted the cultural and legal conflicts unleashed by the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision. That ruling overturned the laws of nearly 30 states and imposed same-sex marriage on the entire country.
In the immediate aftermath of the court’s redefinition of marriage — back when cable news still allowed organizations that supported biblical marriage to appear — I said plainly: the court could make same-sex marriage a legal right, but it could not make it morally right.
I compared it to abortion, seven years before Dobbs overturned Roe. I warned that resistance to the court’s declaration, which defied not only history but also the moral law of God, would persist. Just as it defies nature and conscience for a society to accept a mother taking the life of her own child, it is equally unnatural — and morally incompatible — to claim that a sexual relationship between two men is the same, in meaning or consequence, as the life-giving union of a man and a woman. Justice Samuel Alito saw the conflict coming. In his dissent, he warned that the court’s ruling would be used to “vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” leaving the nation to suffer “bitter and lasting wounds.”
This week, his warning proved prescient. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case out of Montgomery County, Maryland, where parents of elementary school children sued the school district for the right to opt their kids out of instruction that violates their religious beliefs.
What is the objectionable content? Books and curriculum that normalize — and in some cases celebrate — same-sex marriage and the gender confusion that has followed. At the heart of this case is religious liberty and parental rights. Should parents be allowed to shield their four and five-year-olds from ideas that contradict their faith?
Shockingly, the school district not only denied that right — it openly disparaged it. Court records show that officials dismissed the children’s objections as nothing more than parroting the hateful dogma of their parents, even linking their views to white supremacy.
Let me say that again: these are four and five-year-olds. An age so impressionable that in 1963, the court ruled that reading the Bible in schools, which parents could opt their children out of, was unconstitutional — on the grounds it might unduly influence children. Now, Scripture is banned, but books like “What Are Your Words?” “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” and “Pride Puppy” are read to children with no right to opt out.
Write this down: this conflict is not going away. In fact, it’s just beginning — and it may make the 50-year battle over abortion look tame by comparison.
