Carissa Mulder, writing on the Public Discourse blog, has an interesting analysis of the contemporary threats to religious freedom.

Mulder points out that, for most pundits interested in the subject, it appears that the homosexual lobby has posed the biggest threat to religious freedom.

But she suggests that it may be sexual licence in general that is the biggest threat.

She referred to a speech given by Douglas Laycock, who helped craft the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1993, which was designed to protect religious freedom.

Laycock was speaking at an event to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the law.

“He warned that millions of Americans view religious liberty as their enemy because they resent religion’s interference in their sex lives. Even though RFRA is a “super statute,” it will offer religious believers little protection if the nation turns against religious liberty. Statutes can be repealed. Courts can empty them of their meaning,” Mulder writes.

She continues: “How did we get here? People commonly point to the gay rights movement. It is true that the clash between sexual license and religious liberty is most often seen in the context of gay rights. But step back for a moment. In a 2012 survey of 120,000 American adults, Gallup found that only 3.4 percent identified as LGBT. How could such a small minority so dramatically change prevailing opinion?

“The answer may lie in Laycock’s statement: Americans resent religion’s perceived interference in their sex lives. The president of the Barna Group, an evangelical market research organization, recently observed that ‘Young people’s most common complaint . . . is that churches are too focused on sexual issues’.

“The consequences of same-sex marriage may pose the gravest threat to religious liberty, but the cultural conditions and assumptions that make that threat possible are rooted in heterosexual behavior.”

Religions, however, have no right to compel anyone to follow their teachings.

But as Mulder points out, the problem is that “many Americans are offended by the existence of an opposing view”.

“The fact that someone, somewhere, dares to voice disapproval of their sexual behavior is, it now seems, offensive in and of itself. Studied non-judgmentalism is one of the hallmarks of contemporary American culture, with departures viewed as gauche at least or, more commonly, as an illegitimate attack on the sacrosanct individual. If you doubt this, please try telling a group of largely secular thirty-somethings that you believe cohabitation is wrong and see what response you receive,” she says.

Mulder says that as the law moved from saying that the State had no right to restrict access to contraception, it slowly began to expand beyond this, to say that the State had no right to judge any form of consensual sexual activity, teaching the lesson that neither society at large, nor individuals within that society had any such right either.

She writes: “This enforced non-judgmentalism reached its zenith in the abortion cases Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the right to be free of the natural consequences of sexual activity trumped another human’s right to live. The law is a teacher, and Griswold and Eisenstadt impart the lesson that “no one has the right to judge your sexual choices.”

“Together, this line of cases teaches not only that one has the right to sexual intimacy, but that one has the right to consequence-free sexual intimacy.

“Once heterosexuals with relatively traditional sexual preferences embraced the idea that they had the right to consequence-free sexual intimacy, it was a short step to extending the right to those with less-common sexual preferences.”

Read the whole thing.