Kathryn Jean Lopez:
From an interview with David Brody:
“If you think about it, we are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech,” Rubio told CBN News. “Because today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage you are labeled a homophobe and a hater.”
“So what’s the next step after that?” he asked.
“After they are done going after individuals, the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church is hate speech and there’s a real and present danger,” he warned.
He might next recommend people read Kirsten Powers’s The Silencing, which maps what’s been going on quite well.
Russell Shaw writes in a column for Our Sunday Visitor:
In a talk several weeks ago to seminarians of his archdiocese, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia pointed to the driving force that lies behind the new persecution — a radical collapse of moral consensus, reflected in a disastrous breakdown of public moral discourse.
“The biggest problem we face as a culture,” Archbishop Chaput said, “isn’t gay marriage or global warming. It’s not abortion funding or the federal debt. … The deeper problem, the one that’s crippling us, is that we use words like justice, rights, freedom and dignity without any commonly shared meaning. … Our most important debates boil out to who can deploy the best words in the best way to get power.”
