Nine days vs. three months

Thanks, Franklin, for your calm response. I'm sorry that my tone conveyed my frustration. There are so many deceptions and misrepresentations about BCC that it gets infuriating.

"government regulation means compliance" Exactly. And BCC complied with MA non-discrimination law for, I think, over a decade after sexual orientation was added to the list of prohibited considerations. BCC adopted a few children (around a dozen) to gay couples. [it might even be only a dozen to gay couples and individuals, I don't remember] They also arranged many adoptions by single people and announced no plans to stop that practice, even though, in trp's words, it would deprive a child of a mother or father.

You also rightly point out that enforcement is an entirely different matter. Surely if the Mormons can find enough wiggle room, the Catholics can with 1800 years more practice.

Conservative Christians don't seem to be aware of just how silly and absurd they seem when they accuse others of "destroying marriage" or otherwise radically changing the definition of "family."

But evangelical Protestantism, with its curious attitude toward theology and doctrine, dominates the way many Americans think about religion, so it's not surprising that many Christians, even among the Eastern Orthodox, would choose to see gay marriage as an inevitable outcome of the "Sexual Revolution" and not an inevitable consequence of the Reformation.

The Reformers first made way for secular society so that people, and not the state, could make decisions about religion for themselves.

What's particularly fascinating is how very early this freedom necessarily included fully articulated ideas about the sorts of choices people should be able to make on their own about whom they chose to marry and whether or not to end a marriage by legally recognized divorce.

Quite early on in the Reformation we see a number of its leaders arguing quite strongly that marriage was not to be understood solely as a baby-making venture, but that sexual and romantic love, and friendship, were on their own to be understood as a legitimate basis for Christian marriage.

Yet Jesus was utterly clear that marriage was forever.

And Christendom generally honored his unambiguous teaching on the matter for many centuries until Protestants decided that "forever" meant "depending on how long I can tolerate this nitwit I married."

Once you've decided that "forever" doesn't mean forever, and that God happily endorses marriages based solely on passion or even friendship, you've pretty much radically changed what people mean by "marriage" and "family."

But simply because this revolution took place in the distant pass doesn't mean that its effects weren't revolutionary.

Conservative Christians refuse to acknowledge that they are the direct beneficiaries of a movement every bit as radical in scope and intent as Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Even Mr. Dreher owes much to the destruction and upheaval caused by the Reformation.

He can choose which religion to follow without worrying that the state will toss him on a pyre for heresy.

However, should others seek to exercise the freedoms provided them by the Reformation, Mr. Dreher squeals and yips and rhetorically darts about one way and then another, in an apparent effort to evade the overwhelming sense of bad faith and hypocrisy breathing down his neck.