In politics, as in life, it is hard to tell your friends when they’re going down the wrong path. It is so much easier to excuse away their excesses and focus on other people’s sins. But it is the right thing to do if that is what you truly believe. In politics, and especially in a hyper-partisan atmosphere, standing up to your own side can cost you the respect of people who once called you friend. It can cost you professional relationships. It can leave you with battle scars. But it’s worth doing. If we are to have a sane, pluralistic society at peace with itself, we have to have the moral courage to tell our friends and allies when what they are doing is unnecessary, unwise, and unkind.
I know of no American who has done that more consistently and more honorably over the last several years than David French. He has patiently explained the madness and meanness of Trumpism to an Evangelical Christian community that desperately does not want to hear that message. And, though he has been on the receiving end of the most shrill and unfair of condemnations, he has maintained a consistent generosity of spirit.
That combination of resolutely opposing excessive aggression, even from our social allies, of delivering a needed but unwelcome message despite the costs, of pairing resoluteness with a charitable heart, that is what I mean to do here with regards to gay rights as we progressives complete our cultural victory on that front. I contend that the progressive instinct to love our gay and trans fellow citizens combined with the libertarian instinct to respect conscience is the best way forward.
Masterpiece Cake
Progressives should leave Masterpiece Cake alone, and not just in a legal sense.
I’m serious.
For those who need a memory jog, Masterpiece Cake refused to sell a cake to a gay wedding because the owner disagreed with gay marriage. The cake shop owner argued that his cakes were art and that being required to bake such a cake compelled him to make art that was against his values. The Supreme Court ruled in Masterpiece Cake’s favor, though mostly not because of the compelled art argument which they couldn’t even get to because the state government of Colorado was so egregiously biased in how it handled the case.
I don’t actually want to focus on the legalities around art or on how the state of Colorado behaved though. I want to make a broader and less legalistic argument. I believe that progressives shouldn’t sue the Masterpiece Cakes of the world in the first place and as a general rule should not call in the state to punish those who do not want to hold a modern, gay-tolerant understanding of marriage. To be sure, in my view, the legalization of gay marriage is worth celebrating and I think it would be better if every cake shop in the country were willing to serve gay couples, but if there are one or two holdouts here and there, we do not need to call the state in to punish them for that. In fact, it would be a lot better if we didn’t do that because to do so is unnecessary, unwise, and unkind.
Unnecessary
Let’s start with the unnecessary.
We progressives do not need to win every square inch of cultural terrain to create a world where people feel comfortable being whoever they want and being with whomever they want. A simple Google Map search of the greater Denver area shows more than a dozen cake shops, not to mention bakeries, probably all of which- other than Masterpiece Cake- would gladly serve gay, lesbian, or trans customers.
When it comes to how gay and lesbian individuals are treated, we the supporters of gay rights are winning. We’re winning so thoroughly that it’s tempting to rephrase the present-tense ‘winning’ into the past-tense ‘won.’ Accepting gay people as normal is now so mainstream that even the most buttoned-up corporations do their best every June to remind customers that they too support gay rights. The treatment of trans individuals lags behind (regrettably) but does seem better than it used to be and does seem to be going in the right direction. Given this progress, it does not seem to me that it is actually necessary for the state to be called into the fray. In fact, and particularly with regards to trans people’s rights, as Sophia Hottel eloquently explained in LP #3: “Libertarianism for Transgender Issues”, keeping the state out of trans issues altogether seems the strategically superior choice.
Some may say that allowing Masterpiece Cake to discriminate is no different than allowing segregationist restaurants in the 1960s South to continue discriminating. I think though that this analogy doesn’t fit well for a couple of reasons. The first is that the purpose of state-enforced anti-discrimination laws is to create a society in which people can freely move about public spaces. With regards to gay couples, that has already been achieved by cultural shifts. That was not true for Black Americans in the 1960s South. There, large elements of society were militantly committed to racial segregation. At the same time, there were other business owners who wanted a kind of air cover from the government. They wanted the government to strongly prohibit discrimination because then, if any of their white customers complained, they could simply say they were following the law. In that context, one could reasonably make the case that for African-Americans’ freedoms to be secured the state simply had to step in. That is not generally the case today for gay Americans. Is there still some homophobia in some contexts? Definitely. Can one continue to find examples of unfair discrimination against gay individuals today? Absolutely. None of this is to suggest that everyone is as respectful of gay Americans as they ought to be, but to be gay in Colorado in 2021 is not the same as being Black in Mississippi in 1962.
Now, it may be the case that some people stop patronizing Masterpiece Cake for refusing to sell cakes for gay weddings and if so, in my view, that is an entirely different matter than the state being called in. Those potential patrons have as much right to freedom of association as Masterpiece Cake has to freedom of speech. Different people’s mileage will vary on this. Though I do not share Chik-Fil-A’s politics on gay rights, they do not seem to me to be mean or extremist about it and so I’m happy to get a meal there when I happen to be in the South. On the other hand, if I knew a business to be openly nasty to gay customers, I would not go there. Different people will have different views on where to draw these lines and that’s fine.
Unwise
It not just unnecessary to adopt a zealous approach to stamping out every last scintilla of opposition to gay marriage; it is unwise, both for gay rights advocates and for the broader body politic. The movement for legalizing gay marriage was truly won, not at the Supreme Court, but via millions of conversations in which gay men and women explained to their friends and families who they were. If you’ve known someone and loved someone for many years, their heart’s deepest desires are not an easy thing to brush off. Those millions of conversations were profoundly persuasive in a way that no state action could be. Moreover, gay people who wanted to marry did not denounce heterosexual marriage. They said “marriage is an ancient and wholesome institution and it’s unfair, even monstrous, to exclude us from it.” That was a message as effective as it was true. Gay marriage proponents were never, are never, trying to take away anything from anyone.
Not only that but an insistence upon using the state to obliterate all opponents of gay marriage only hardens social division. What the Sohrab Ahmari’s of the world say is that there is a domestic war between the theocrats on their side and the illiberal wokes on the other, that there is no more room or time for civility, that the woke mobs are out to hound everyone into obedience to whatever the latest progressive social value is and, most worryingly, that traditionalists ought to embrace an illiberal authoritarian posture because that is the only way in which they can protect themselves.
But, if we the progressives can manage ourselves well enough that we create some kind of space for social conservatives, that actually does something better than silence Sohrab Ahmari- it makes him obsolete. Progressives deciding to just ignore rather than malign the Masterpiece Cakes would show well why Ahmari’s belief set is neither necessary nor valuable. After all, what’s the point of a bunker mentality If no one is firing at you now or going to fire at you in the future? If we progressives can convince religious traditionalists that we don’t hate them, that we don’t hold them in contempt, and that we’re not coming for them, then maybe they would calm down a bit and stop treating every disagreement as a prologue to the Rapture. The wise course of action for progressives is to work to be seen as nice people. The unwise course is to engage in actions viewed as aggressive and dogmatic.
Unkind
More important than being unnecessary and unwise, the maximalist position is also unkind. Matthew 5:38-39 says “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”
Have social conservatives historically been mean to gay people? Without question. Are some of them still mean to gay people? Also without question. But progressives ought to aim at a higher moral goal than simply retaliation. Vengeance is not justice. Christ preached a message of kindness and grace. We progressives ought to aim to be more Christ-like than our opponents, and we must recognize that such a course is not backing down or weakness. Rather, it is a different kind of strength.
There is a soaring moral ambition to turning the other cheek. It runs counter to every human impulse and yet it holds out the promise of a different world. It says that magnanimity and forbearance are not cowardice but courage, that kindness is not naivete but rather is an unyielding commitment to all that is good and true, that your enemies may have the power to hurt you but they don’t have the power to make you become a worse version of yourself. I know of no notion more heady than that. I know of no notion that is simultaneously as impossible to fully achieve and as important to ceaselessly strive for. And I know of no living American who tries harder at it than David French.
That man has a great multitude of battle scars fighting the rising tide of illiberalism within the Evangelical Christian community, and yet he remains gracious, resolute but not angry. In my view, as it pertains to the intersection of faith, politics, and society, his moral leadership over the past half-decade has been simply unparalleled. And so, we progressives need to ask ourselves, “if David French were a progressive, what would he do?”
I think that, if he were a progressive, he’d be patient with the cake shop owner, relying on humanity rather than threats to try to persuade the owner of the appropriateness of making a wedding cake for a gay couple. I think that he’d continue to be kind if and when the cake shop owner still refused to do so. I’m completely confident that David French does not envy the respect and decency with which gay people are usually treated today. I think that if he were a progressive, he would not self-righteously boast of his moral superiority to the cake shop owner. Nor would he be easily angered by the quiet choice of one cake shop in a Denver suburb nor would he zealously keep a record of that cake shop’s political wrongdoings.
As Corinthians 3:7 tells us, “Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres.” I am quite sure that is how David French would conduct himself if he were a progressive and so I am quite sure that is how we progressives ought to conduct ourselves when confronted with social conservatives whose consciences are at odds with the zeitgeist. We ought to always protect conscience, always trust in our fellow citizens to mean well, always hope for the continued progress in how gay and trans individuals are treated, and always persevere in persuading people that gay and trans individuals deserve equal treatment. Those imperatives are not easy to reconcile, but that is our task.
If he were in our shoes, that is what David French would do.