By Joe Schaeffer

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of homosexual marriage as a Constitutional right, Christian opponents are left to wonder how the changed legal landscape will affect them.

Statements made by same-sex marriage advocates leading up to and following the ruling indicate that they are expecting full acceptance, not just tolerance, of the new status quo.

“Grumblings or not, gay marriage is now the law of the land. And all of us — right and left, gay and straight, religious and agnostic — need to take a moment to regroup and refocus,” wrote a jubilant Brandon Ambrosino in a column for Time Magazine posted after Friday’s ruling.

“From this day on, we need to behave differently toward one another.

“Since Christians are under an extreme obligation from their founder to take the lead on reconciliation, I think they should be the ones to set the example here,” Ambrosino continued. “That means, whatever their private theological convictions on the matter, they need to respect the law and find ways to honor and even celebrate their gay neighbors’ happiness.”

After pushing his own theological argument for discarding religious prohibitions against homosexuality, Ambrosino wrote that, “[i]f Christians can’t find the humility to re-evaluate their most cherished beliefs about sexuality, then at the very least they should err on the side of charity and quietly resign themselves to the fact that marriage equality is here to stay.”

In a Friday Daily Beast article detailing the joyous response at New York’s Stonewall Inn, considered the birthplace of the modern “gay rights” movement, reporters Tim Teeman and Kevin Fallon castigated Christian opponents and expressed little tolerance for future dissent against the court ruling.

“On a day like today, when the highest court in the land has affirmed the importance and principle of equality, to see [opponents] foam at the mouth condemning this and mewling like babies over how unfair it all is, makes one realize just how disgusting they are — and how farcically detached they are from any semblance of the Christianity they claim to espouse,” the pair wrote.

“There are already squalls, and who knows what else to come. On Friday, a clerk in Texas refused to do her job and issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and in other states are dark grumblings of resistance—law-defying, mean-minded losers, all of them. One hopes they are made to observe the law of the land and, if unable to do so, prosecuted.”

Liberal activists had already rejected “religious freedom rights” as justification for opposing the homosexual agenda in the workplace in the months leading up to the court’s ruling.

Writing in February about Ford Motor Company’s firing of a worker after he “responded negatively to a shared online article outlining Ford’s LGBT-inclusiveness,” Carlos Maza at the liberal organization Media Matters for America declared:

“It remains to be seen whether [Thomas] Banks’ story will become another rallying cry for ‘religious liberty’ apologists in conservative media, but his [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] complaint highlights the ugly consequences of the right’s obsession with excusing homophobia.

“‘Homosexual behavior leads to death’ is not a statement of religious belief — it’s an inflammatory and hateful attack on gay people, and it’s a sentiment that even religious conservatives would be wise not [sic] to distance themselves from.”

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, writing in April on the Indiana bakery that refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, gave his take on religious liberty for Christians, asserting that “our debate about religious freedom should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.”

Bruni states just why this conversation is so necessary.

“[I]t’s a vital message because of something that Indiana demonstrated anew: Religion is going to be the final holdout and most stubborn refuge for homophobia,” he writes.

“It will give license to discrimination. It will cause gay and lesbian teenagers in fundamentalist households to agonize needlessly: Am I broken? Am I damned?

“’Conservative Christian religion is the last bulwark against full acceptance of L.G.B.T. people,’ [Mercer University’s David] Gushee said.”

Bruni states that these Christians must be made to change their beliefs.

“[Former United Methodist pastor Jimmy] Creech and Mitchell Gold, a prominent furniture maker and gay philanthropist, founded an advocacy group, Faith in America, which aims to mitigate the damage done to L.G.B.T. people by what it calls ‘religion-based bigotry,'” Bruni writes.

“Gold told me that church leaders must be made ‘to take homosexuality off the sin list.’

“His commandment is worthy — and warranted. All of us, no matter our religious traditions, should know better than to tell gay people that they’re an offense. And that’s precisely what the florists and bakers who want to turn them away are saying to them.”

Also writing on the Indiana controversy in April for Slate, Nathaniel Frank, “director of the What We Know Project at Columbia Law School,” assumed a posture of sympathy for befuddled Christians as he shared Bruni’s desire to get them to turn away from their opposition to homosexuality.

“I almost felt sorry for [the bakers] and the millions of other anti-gay Christians who seem genuinely not to understand how their views could be problematic in 2015. Indeed, as fun as it can be to watch and contribute to the pillorying of anti-gay Christians, reductive name-calling may actually be hindering progress for people on both sides of this issue.”

Frank writes that many Christians don’t understand that they are “anti-gay” and are “delusional” about their acts of discrimination.

“Prejudice is universal, but particular prejudices are learned in particular contexts,” he writes. “This is what too many anti-gay Christians seem not to realize — there is no religious reason why the Bible’s anti-gay passages should have come to dominate the hearts and minds of Christian conservatives more than its passages condemning divorce or environmental degradation.”

Frank’s solution, written in anticipation of a coming Supreme Court ruling, was to help Christians overcome their “ignorance” through “self-examination”:

“There is no doubt that many Christians truly think that by refusing to cater to same-sex marriages, they are simply being faithful to their religious tradition.

“They’re wrong. But they’re wrong because they lack self-knowledge, not because they are expressing socially unpopular views. And as fun as it may be to publicly sneer at their ignorance and to attribute it to malice, it may be more effective to nudge them toward self-examination, to offer a kind of amnesty for their sins of omission.”

Joe Schaeffer is a freelance writer and editor.

  ‘celebrate’ our happiness, Brandon Ambrosino, Carlos Maza, Frank Bruni, Kevin Fallon, Media Matters, Nathaniel Frank, Same-sex winners to Christian losers: Change your beliefs, Tim Teeman, WorldTribune.com