After Winning Culture Battle Progressives Looking for Wounded to Shoot

After their rather complete victory in the Supreme Court last week, with Judge Roberts rewriting the Obamacare to correct what he claimed was some sloppy verbiage, as well as finding a right to gay marriage hiding under the emanations and penumbras of a right to "dignity" also not found in written form, the left has declared total victory and is now looking for survivors of the battle to terminate with extreme prejudice:

State Silences Bakers Who Refused to Make Cake for Lesbian Couple, Fines Them $135K

Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian finalized a preliminary ruling today ordering Aaron and Melissa Klein, the bakers who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, to pay $135,000 in emotional damages to the couple they denied service.

“This case is not about a wedding cake or a marriage,” Avakian wrote. “It is about a business’s refusal to serve someone because of their sexual orientation. Under Oregon law, that is illegal.”

In the ruling, Avakian placed an effective gag order on the Kleins, ordering them to “cease and desist” from speaking publicly about not wanting to bake cakes for same-sex weddings based on their Christian beliefs.

“This effectively strips us of all our First Amendment rights,” the Kleins, owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, which has since closed, wrote on their Facebook page. “According to the state of Oregon we neither have freedom of religion or freedom of speech.”

Wow, telling them to stop speaking publicly? That's pretty anti-American even for Oregon.

From the new girl at the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell: Americans are entitled to religious freedom, but there are limits

It used to be that budget cuts were the best way to kill a law you hated but lacked the votes to formally repeal. You know, if you can’t beat ’em, defund ’em.

Times have changed. Now the mantra is: If you can’t beat ’em, out-God ’em. . .

Yes, since the dawn of the republic, there have been protections for the free exercise of religion, both in our Constitution and in separate statutes, such as those relating to the military draft and religious pacifists. But religious exemptions to laws have been granted only within very prescribed bounds — including the principle that you’re entitled to religious accommodations only if they don’t burden or harm others, or otherwise create havoc in the legal system.

Freedom of religion was an idea widely embraced by progressives, until conventional Christians started to be threatened by them. Now the idea must by sanitized away.

Washed up gay character actor uses racial slur: George Takei: Justice Clarence Thomas ‘a clown in blackface’ and ‘a disgrace to America’

Actor George Takei called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “a clown in blackface sitting there on the Supreme Court.”

In an interview with FOX 10 Phoenix, Takei, best known as Capt. Sulu on “Star Trek,” said Thomas “gets me angry. He doesn’t belong there.”

Takei is openly gay, and Justice Thomas wrote in dissent of the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of gay marriage. As part of that dissent, Justice Thomas wrote “human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them.”

The progressive  website "Vox" has decided, here on the 3d of July, that perhaps the American Revolution was a mistake; that we would have been better off under British rule: 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake

1. Abolition would have come faster without independence
2. Independence was bad for Native Americans
3. America would have a better system of government if we'd stuck with Britain

Because "Global Warming":

In the US, activists wanting to put a price on carbon emissions spent years trying to put together a coalition to make it happen, mobilizing sympathetic businesses and philanthropists and attempting to make bipartisan coalition — and they still failed to pass cap and trade, after millions of dollars and man hours. In the UK, the Conservative government decided it wanted a carbon tax. So there was a carbon tax. Just like that. Passing big, necessary legislation — in this case, legislation that's literally necessary to save the planet — is a whole lot easier with parliaments than presidential systems.

To be sure, one of the bug bears of progressives is taxes. Progressives love taxes, and always want more. The American Revolution was more or less a revolution against excessive taxation by the Brits, as well as against their tyrannical rule in the colonies.

Ed Morrisey takes on the valiant job of Fisking this abortion from top to bottom: Peak Vox: The American Revolution was a mistake, you know

At least this essay from Dylan Matthews is more of an opinion piece, and Dylan’s entitled to his opinions and to write about them, even if they are more or less spun out of pure fantasy. That’s what this is, of course — a series of improbable what-ifs that ignore historical realities and contexts for simplistic assumptions, built around a trollish central argument guaranteed to get clicks. It’s practically old-school undergrad blogging at its most pure, and only needs some Rule 5 imagery to complete the experience.

Via Wombat-socho's "In The Mailbox: Little Round Top & Cemetery Hill", Sultan Knish: No Truce With the Left

. . . By 2024, the Republican gay and tranny candidates will be dismissed as tokens while the media oohs and aahs over a vocal and charismatic campaigner for some other love that dare not speak its name.

And that's the point. It has always been the point.

The left does not care about gay rights. If you doubt that, consider how many of the left's favorite Muslim countries have gay rights. The left has recently divided its campaign passions between gay marriage and defending Iran. Iran denies the existence of gays and hangs them where it finds them.

The USSR treated homosexuality as a crime even while it was recruiting gay men as spies in the West. Cuba, the darling of the American left, hated both gays and blacks. The ACLU backed the police states of Communism. If the left supports an enemy nation, the odds are excellent that it is also a violently bigoted place that makes a KKK rally look like a hippie hangout.

To understand the left, you need to remember that it does not care about 99 percent of the things it claims to care about. Name a leftist cause and then find a Communist country that actually practiced it. Labor unions? Outlawed. Environmentalism? Chernobyl. The left fights all sorts of social and political battles not because it believes in them, but to radicalize, disrupt and take power.

The left does not care about social justice. It cares about power.

That is why no truce is possible with the left. Not on social issues. Not on any issues.

The left is a drunk in a bar trying to pick a fight with you. Trying to convince him that you didn't disrespect him, put something in his beer to make him dizzy or make his feet so heavy won't work. There's no 'agree to disagree' possible here. He's picking a fight with you because he wants a fight.

The left does not care about Bruce Jenner. It does not care about gay rights, equal pay, police brutality or even slavery. Its activists 'care' about those things a great deal right now, but they could easily be persuaded tomorrow to be outraged by telephone poles, shredded wheat or people in green sweaters.

They care mainly about emotional venting and exercising power over others. It's the same phenomenon witnessed during the Salem Witch Trials, the French Revolution or any other mob scene. Except the individual elements of the mob are on social media and have a hashtag.

The outraged social justice warrior was laughing at tranny jokes a few years ago. Now he's ready to  kill over minor verbal missteps. A few years from now he'll be laughing at them again.

In a similar vein, Jonah Goldberg at NRO: You Can’t Compromise with Culture Warriors

It might be too much to think that progressive activists and intellectuals would demobilize after such a “Mission Accomplished” moment. But a reasonable person might expect social-justice warriors to at least take the weekend off to celebrate.

But no. Even when the cookie is this big, the mice want something more. The call went out that there were new citadels to conquer. Within hours of the decision, Politico ran a call to arms titled “It’s Time to Legalize Polygamy: Why Group Marriage Is the Next Horizon of Social Liberalism.” On Sunday, Time magazine had Mark Oppenheimer’s “Now’s the Time to End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions.”

Earlier in the week, as corporations and politicians were racing one another to shove the Confederate flag down the memory hole, a co-host asked CNN’s Don Lemon whether the Jefferson Memorial should be removed from the National Mall because the former president owned slaves. He said no, but that “there may come a day when we want to rethink Jefferson.”

Within hours of the same sex-marriage ruling, the White House was beaming the gay-pride rainbow flag on its facade. This is the White House whose current occupant campaigned in 2008 passionately insisting that his religious faith required him to oppose gay marriage. The president and his party now consider that position to be unalloyed bigotry.