“No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.” —Alan Bullock, British Historian

Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last time, the political Left (and some libertarian allies) have attempted to declare victory on an issue by redefining the terms, maligning dissenters, and using strong-arm tactics to suppress dissent in the debate over homosexual “marriage” and “gay rights.” Watching the hysteria and outrage over Indiana’s recently signed Religious Freedom Restoration Act, one would think conservative Christians were attacking homosexuals with fire hoses and attack dogs.

So it is that I must respectfully take issue with the assertions of my more socially liberal friends, who paint the RFRA legislation as an instrument of discrimination, relegating homosexuals (and bisexuals and transgendered, and the dozens of other sub-categories of sexual “identities” that one may now claim to have — like a Baskin Robbins of sexual preferences) to the status of “second class citizenship.”

Though the Left claims RFRA laws allow conservative Christians and others to refuse service to homosexuals, the reality is that the instances generally referenced, where a Christian has declined to provide a service to homosexuals, all center around refusal to provide services for a specific event, a same-sex “marriage,” rather than a refusal to provide services to homosexuals in general.

Baronelle Stutzman, the 70-year old owner of Arlene’s Flowers, faces the loss of her home, business, and life’s work for politely declining to provide flower arrangements for the “wedding” of a homosexual couple. The same couple for which she declined the service had been customers of hers for years, so clearly Stutzman was not refusing to serve homosexuals. And despite the fact that there were easily dozens of other local florists who would have happily provided the service, the homosexual couple chose to destroy the life of this kind-hearted septuagenarian.

For those who have failed to adopt, or at least acquiesce to, the revisionist narrative of the LGBT Mafia, there will be no effort to persuade through logic, reason, or an appeal to a moral high ground. The next step is character assassination. After it was discovered that Brandon Eich, former CEO and co-founder of Mozilla (which created the popular Firefox browser) had, nearly a decade previously, donated $1000 to California’s “Prop 8” movement, which sought to legally define marriage as between a man and a woman (which passed even in that uber-liberal state), the LGBT Mafia brought enormous pressure on Mozilla to fire Eich for his “anti-gay” position. This despite the fact that not a single LGBT person ever claimed he had mistreated or discriminated against them. No, Eich’s “sin” was simply to have held a viewpoint which is no longer politically correct. Eich soon resigned from the company he spent a good portion of his career building.

The same witch hunt was launched against former Atlanta Fire Department Chief Kelvin Cochran, who self-published a book on his Christian viewpoints, which mentioned homosexuality only once, in the context of biblical doctrine. Like Eich, he was fired for simply holding unpopular beliefs. Not one person under his command ever claimed he had mistreated or discriminated against them, but it didn’t matter. The PC Thought Police demanded his head.

In New Mexico, a photographer was fined thousands of dollars for declining to photograph a same-sex “wedding.” In Washington State, a husband-and-wife bakery was driven out of business after homosexual “rights” activists not only boycotted the business, but harassed their customers, all because they declined to bake a cake for a lesbian “wedding” ceremony. Not only did they have to close their shop; they were also threatened with physical violence for not submitting to homosexual rights orthodoxy. They received emails and phone calls from people expressing the desire to see their children get sick and die, or that the owners be shot, or the wife raped. This is the “tolerance” of the homosexual “rights” crowd.

This same type of hysteria, slander, and outright lies have been brought to bear against the state of Indiana, which recently enacted its Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a near mirror image of the same federal law passed unanimously by the U.S. House of Representatives, near-unanimously by the U.S. Senate (97-3), and signed into law by Democrat President Bill Clinton. It was spearheaded by none other than leftist stalwart Chuck Schumer.

So, if Indiana’s passage of a state RFRA is evidence of anti-gay bigotry, does that mean Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and the hundreds of Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate in 1993 were/are also anti-gay bigots? To be fair, Democrats authored the bill to protect Native Americans who were using peyote, a mind-altering drug, during religious ceremonies. They may not have been so eager to pass it had they suspected those awful Christians might one day benefit from it.

What about the nearly two dozen other states that have passed RFRA laws? Are the people and leaders of those states — Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia — all anti-gay bigots? Is Barack Obama, who voted for Illinois’s state RFRA as a state senator, also an anti-gay bigot, especially considering his publically declared position, held up until just a couple of years ago, of marriage as between a man and a woman?

The Left has attempted to silence dissent by painting all who oppose same-sex “marriage” as anti-gay bigots, by painting RFRA laws as instruments of hate and discrimination, and by threatening the livelihoods — and even the lives — of those that disagree with them.

After Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed their state RFRA into law, all hell broke loose. The scaremongers were out in force, claiming Christian businesses would now be free to refuse service to homosexuals, or fire them from their jobs. The notion is ridiculous on its face. RFRA laws have been in place in nearly two-thirds of the states for nearly a quarter century, and we have not seen any evidence of widespread, institutionalized discrimination against homosexuals in even the most religious of those states. In fact, evidence of ANY such discrimination is scant at best. But we are now supposed to believe that suddenly millions of Christian conservatives will begin persecuting homosexuals just because a law was passed?

That is what the NCAA (which threatened to move any of its business away from Indiana, including the very lucrative Final Four basketball tournament games in Indianapolis), Angie’s List (which has cancelled a major expansion of its corporate campus in Indiana), and Apple CEO Tim Cook would have us believe. Angie’s List CEO Bill Oesterle claims Indiana’s law means “Employers in most of the state of Indiana can fire a person simply for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning. That’s just not right and that’s the real issue here. Our employees deserve to live, work and travel with open accommodations in any part of the state.” Tellingly, Oesterle provided not one single example of an LGBT person being fired based on their sexual preference.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is even more of a hypocrite. Cook, who is openly homosexual, wrote an op-ed piece recently in which he claimed religious freedom laws are “designed to enshrine discrimination in state law.” Yet Cook’s outrage and moral courage are highly selective. Cook, one of the richest men on the face of the Earth, has given no such lectures to the powers that be in the seventeen nations where Apple does business in which homosexuality is illegal, including four (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates) where homosexuality is punishable by death. Will Cook show his moral courage by threatening to pull Apple products out of those countries until they embrace homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle choice? Will he pull Apple products from China, home to more than a billion people, and a nation where homosexuals are forbidden from adopting children and are not afforded many of the same privileges as heterosexuals?

Amusingly, and with no hint that he recognizes the obvious irony, Washington Post editorial board member Jonathon Capehart lectures us that we must not accuse Cook, or the CEO’s of Wal-Mart or Mariott International, about their hypocrisy. Says Capehart, “In a perfect world, Cook (and Sorenson and McMillon) would be as publicly vocal abroad as they have been at home. Yet, you would be a fool to expect them to shake their fists with equal vigor in less tolerant countries — unless your goal is to get them fired. The Almighty Dollar reigns supreme in the publicly traded companies they run. Their first responsibility is to shareholders who want growth in markets, dividends and profits. Their American outspokenness could result in much more than eyerolls if exercised in another country. Their companies could get locked out of a market by a foreign government or disgruntled stockholders could force their ouster over the potential hit to stock prices.”

Get that? Taking a moral stand is okay, so long as you don’t lose revenue or take a hit to stock prices. I thought it was only greedy, heartless conservatives who are driven by the profit motive. Furthermore, Cook stated in his op-ed that he was speaking on behalf of his company, Apple, which is interesting, considering the outrage from the left after the Citizens United ruling. Liberals have lectured us ad nauseum that corporations should not enjoy free speech rights because they are not people. I guess if you are a corporation that supports homosexual “marriage” then you are deserving of free speech protections, but if you hold the opposite view, or simply believe those who hold an opposite view are worthy of protection, then your viewpoint should be crushed.

The bottom line is this. The PC Thought Police and the Gay Mafia are willing to use slander, lies, and threats to livelihoods and lives to bully dissenters into submission. The religious freedom laws do not legalize discrimination, and they know it. It simply protects religious people from being persecuted for acting on principles of their faith. The laws do not legalize discrimination; they simply apply a standard which government must use in order to show that it has a compelling reason to violate someone’s religious beliefs.

Conservatives may disagree with homosexual marriage or the lifestyle in general, but do you recall efforts to boycott companies who support it? Do you recall encouragement of violent protests? Businesses like Memories Pizza of Walkerton, Indiana, are the targets of death threats for simply saying they agree with the new law protecting religious freedoms. For the Left, disagreement is not sufficient. In their eyes, dissent merits destruction.

The brutal truth, and the bitter irony, is that the homosexual “rights” movement has long declared its goal was to promote tolerance of a lifestyle with which many Americans disagreed. Yet it is the homosexual “rights” movement which has shown itself to be the most intolerant of all.