Ten Commandments out, Pride banners in

The ACLU and several other civil rights groups are supporting a federal lawsuit to strike down a new Louisiana law that mandates the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms. These civil rights groups claim they are protecting “separation of church and state” and that public schools are no place for religious indoctrination.

The lawsuit arrives during Pride Month, when hundreds of government organizations, including educational institutions, declare their everlasting devotion to the cult of LGBTQ. Due to a concerted effort by militant activists, the United States has transformed into a country where displaying Pride and Black Lives Matter banners in the classroom is normal, but posting the Ten Commandments in a classroom is unconstitutional.

Corporations, academia, law enforcement agencies, and media entities turn June into the new American Ramadan, honoring the unofficial state religion.

With the culturally ubiquitous celebration of all things queer during the month of June, it can be easy to forget that the current phase of the civil rights revolution is relatively recent. During the Democratic presidential primary of 2008, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton declared their steadfast support for the traditional definition of marriage being between one man and one woman. That same year, California passed Proposition 8 with 52% of the vote. That measure enshrined the traditional definition of marriage in that bluest of blue state’s constitution.

Clinton and Obama were most certainly lying about their real positions, but the fact that they were compelled to do so tells you much about the controversy surrounding the issue at the time. The fact that almost half of Republicans now support gay marriage, putting them to the left of both Clinton and Obama in 2008, also tells you a great deal about how quickly conservatives conform to power.

Most LGBTQ activists in 2008 were still debating whether nationwide gay marriage was even a possibility and, in many cases, offered civil unions as a compromise. In present-day America, voicing mild disagreement with the child mutilation ritual known as “transitioning” will get you fired from any major corporation or government position. The FBI, which has targeted traditional Catholic services for surveillance and intimidated parents who oppose gender indoctrination in schools, now proudly posts pictures of its agents marching in Pride parades.

How did LGBTQ ideology go from a controversial issue that even left-wing candidates had to distance themselves from to the official state religion in less than two decades?

The modern interpretation of the establishment clause in the First Amendment has been an unmitigated disaster. In the mind of most Americans, it has created a separation of church and state that bans even the mere acknowledgement of religion. And yet the Bible was the foundational text of Western civilization for over 1,000 years. Even those who did not personally believe in Christianity were steeped in its language, understanding that the archetypes and narratives contained within the Bible formed the basis for their shared culture. The idea that students could understand Shakespeare or Milton without being deeply familiar with the holy text was considered absurd.

By expelling biblical education from public schools in the name of secular neutrality, we effectively banned Western culture. Now, our children speak the shared language of gay race communism instead.

The idea that institutions can be governed by secular neutrality is a lie. All human institutions require a worldview that guides their decisions and coordinates their actions. No matter how objective or neutral the goals of an institution pretend to be, they are always guided by a set of values and beliefs. When Christianity was purged from American public life through a radical interpretation of the First Amendment and civil rights law, an ideological void was left at the center of our institutions, and nature abhors a vacuum. LGBTQ ideology stood ready to fill that void.

The modern notion of separation of church and state has a very specific set of legal triggers. Religions make claims about metaphysical deities, hold certain holy scriptures as sacred, and generally congregate in collective places of worship. If an ideology fulfills the same function as a religion but does so without the formal trappings of a church, then it can evade most of the restrictions that theoretically exist to keep our institutions neutral. Every institution must be animated by a set of principles, a philosophy or ideology that guides its actions. With all its religious competitors legally barred from filling that role, LGBTQ ideology became the victor by default.

Progressive secular humanism — call it wokeness, if you like — combines the most hostile portions of queer theory, racial grievance, and Marxist oppression ideology into the gay race communism that now rules every major American institution. Corporations, academia, law enforcement agencies, and media entities turn June into the new American Ramadan, honoring the unofficial state religion. Any of these organizations would face endless lawsuits for the most basic display of solidarity with the Christian faith, so instead they worship the gods they are allowed to honor. The victory of wokeness did not come from compelling arguments made in the marketplace of ideas or the swaying of hearts and minds, but from the legal incentives created by a delusional belief in institutional neutrality.

If conservatives want to live in a country where the Ten Commandments are less controversial than puberty blockers for 10-year-olds, they must abandon the modern fantasy of neutrality. The question is not whether your nation will worship but what your nation will worship. Anyone pretending otherwise is simply looking to smuggle their beliefs in the backdoor.