The Re-Education President

The Examiner reports that, in his Obergefell v. Hodges speech, President Obama "said Americans need to change their religious views to be accepting of gay marriage."

I don't find any words of compulsion directed toward anyone's religious views in the speech. Obama is unreserved in his enthusiasm for the Supreme Court decision, and can't say enough good things about homosexuality, but here he's not as artless in his convictions as Hillary Clinton has been.

Obama does, though, offer this bit of troubling moralizing:

Shifts in hearts and minds is possible.  And those who have come so far on their journey to equality have a responsibility to reach back and help others join them.

Two words are particularly concerning: "responsibility" and "help."

How can we say we have good government if it doesn't help its citizens fulfill their civic responsibilities? In some cases -- say, in the case of a responsibility that the president just invented -- it may even need to empower us. A citizenry that meets its responsibilities is a good citizenry, and what decent, loving human being could oppose that?

Ordinarily, when a president speaks of American citizens helping each other, it's the sort of moral suasion and encouragement a president ought to offer. In this case, though, he wants American citizens to help other American citizens abandon reason, human tradition, and the word of God. That's not helping. At best, it bodes the sort of woman C.S. Lewis mentioned who "lives for others -- you can always tell the others by their hunted expression." At worst... well, how can we say we have good government if it doesn't help its citizens?

Nor is it comforting when you try to get inside the mindset of those who would cheer this speech, who think love won on Friday. From that perspective, we ignorant hateful bigots aren't just sitting at home thinking our ignorant hateful bigot thoughts, we are actively injuring decent and good people who just want to be who they are. Why wouldn't they work to stop us? Why wouldn't you work to stop a hunter from shooting through some bushes at a playground, whether or not he could see that those moving shapes are actually children?

The new evangelization proceeds apace.

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