What I like most about Steve Cornell’s column in our paper last weekend on Teh Dreaded Gay is one single line:

We will be under the tyranny of tolerance and no exception will be tolerated!

The tyranny of tolerance!

My goodness. How despotic to ask that all people, regardless of whom they might be sleeping with, have the same rights.

To his credit, I suppose, Cornell at least asserts that Teh Gay should be left alone to do his or her thing so long as they don’t ask for the same rights as the rest of us.

But it’s rather disingenuous for Cornell to insinuate that - sure, he’d be right there on the front lines if we were talking about discrimination for any other reason:

Civil-rights battles should be restricted to matters of nature, not lifestyle.

I’d be right there, baby, if we were talking about blacks being discriminated against instead of gays.

Funny thing, though. The course I’m taking this semester is called Religion & Politics (topical, no?). The readings and the discussions have been about the role religion has played in shaping our politics; and that role has been substantial throughout history. It is no stretch whatsoever to say that without “people of faith,” some of the greatest moral victories in our history - like the abolition of slavery - would never have been achieved.

But I’ve long been wary of the religions right’s attempt to embrace these historical victories as their own. A century and a half ago - would it have been the religious right that would have stood against slavery?

Why, no.

Indeed, if you see today’s “religious right” as an outgrowth of southern evanglicalism - which it is - then perhaps you’d understand that it was southern evangelicalism that defended slavery. The northern abolitionists, in fact, were considered the radical leftists of their time (though left and right now bears little relation to how the sides were divvied up then).

But this is the thing that’s always bothered me about conservative evangelicalism. During the 1950s and 1960s, was it conservative evangelicals who were at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement? Why, no. It was northern, liberal churches - those mainline denominations that we like to denigrate as “dying” today. Indeed, I just finished a book on Martin Luther King Jr. in which the author declared that King’s faith was “university-acquired.”

University??? Elitist!

The reality is, 40 years ago - 150 years ago - the Steve Cornells of the world were most certainly not on the front lines of the war over racial discrimination. They like to think they would have been, of course - and it’s easy to think that now, because religion did play the key role in the movement. But let us not forget that Jerry Falwell’s opposition to the Civil Rights Movement - in his terminology, the Civil Wrongs Movement.

For the religious right only recently turned to politics; and in that time, it has been far less concerned with matters of equality than it has been in keeping equality at bay if equality threatens the nation’s “moral fabric” - as determined, of course, by the religious right.

So when the likes of Cornell say Sure, we’re right there when we’re talking about civil rights on the basis of how you were born, don’t believe it. Cultural conservatism is virtually never interested in rights - only restrictions.