By William McGurn | The Wall Street Journal
PHOTO: Vice President Mike Pence and Karen Pence -ASSOCIATED PRESS
A mob of secular Puritans targets her for teaching at a Christian
school.
Will no one speak up for Karen Pence other than her
husband?
In scarcely a week, the vice president’s wife
has become a public face of hate. CNN’s John King suggests
that what Mrs. Pence has done is so grievous maybe taxpayers shouldn’t fund her
Secret Service security protection.
The American Civil Liberties Union says
she’s sending “a terrible message to students.”
The Guardian sees in Mrs. Pence a reminder of “the vice-president’s
dangerous bigotry.”
During a Saturday night performance in Las Vegas, Lady Gaga
told her fans that what Mrs. Pence has done confirms she and her husband are
“the worst representation of what it means to be Christian.”
A former
Washington Post editor and senior writer for Politico tweets: “How can this
happen in America?”
So what is this terrible thing Mrs. Pence has done?
She
plans to teach art part-time at Immanuel Christian School in Northern Virginia.
This is a small private K-8 academy where Mrs. Pence has taught before.
It
adheres to a biblically rooted view of human sexuality.
Thanks to the crack reporters at the Washington Post,
what this means is no mystery.
The Post reports the following provision in the
school’s employment contract:
“I understand that the term ‘marriage’ has only
one meaning; the uniting of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive
covenant union as delineated in Scripture.”
Hmmm. Though presented as dangerous stuff, we’ve heard
this before.
For example, this is how Senate candidate Barack Obama put it in a
2004 radio interview:
“I’m a Christian, and so although I try not to have my
religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do
believe that tradition and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something
sanctified between a man and a woman.”
So why are so many eager to cast the first stone against
Mrs. Pence and not Mr. Obama?
Because everyone knew when Mr. Obama spoke he
didn’t really mean it; his position was taken out of political calculation.
Mrs. Pence’s sin is that she really believes what she says.
In the narrow sense, the vilification of Mrs. Pence makes
prophetic Justice Samuel Alito’s prediction in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision
throwing out all state laws against same-sex marriage.
Justice Alito saw a
perilous future for those who still embraced the view Mr. Obama once claimed to
hold.
“I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper
their thoughts in the recesses of their homes,” he wrote, “but if they repeat those
views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by
governments, employers, and schools.”
In the larger sense the faith-shaming of Mrs. Pence
exposes an inversion of tropes.
In history and literature, typically it has
been the religious side that can’t tolerate the slightest disagreement from its
dogma and behaves like outraged 17th-century Salemites when they think they
have uncovered a witch.
Now look at the Immanuel Christian School. Those who run
it know they and those who think like them are the big losers in America’s
culture war. All they ask is to be allowed, within the confines of their
community, to uphold 2,000 years of Christian teaching on marriage, sexuality
and the human person.
When Obergefell was decided, it was sold
as live-and-let-live.
But as Justice Alito foresaw, today some sweet
mysteries of the universe are more equal than others.
In other words, it
isn’t enough for the victors to win; the new sense of justice requires that
those who still don’t agree must be compelled to violate their deepest beliefs,
whether this means forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide
contraception or dragging a baker in Colorado through the courts until he
agrees to make a cake celebrating “gender transition.”
Today’s militant secularists ironically
resemble the worst caricatures of religious intolerance of early America.
Where
the Puritans humiliated sinners with the stocks, the modern intolerant
have Twitter .
Where
the Amish shunned those who lived contrary to their beliefs, today’s violators
find themselves driven off the public square.
And whereas in Hawthorne’s novel
Hester Prynne was forced to wear a scarlet “A”—for adulterer—today we have
folks such as Jimmy Kimmel using their popular platforms to paint the scarlet
“H”—for hater—on people such as Mrs. Pence.
Vice President Mike Pence defended both his wife and
Christian education during an appearance last Thursday on EWTN, a Catholic
television network.
But it says something that so few on the commanding
heights of our culture have been wiling to join him there.
It would be a shame if Mrs. Pence were to allow the mob
to keep her from teaching art to those children at Immanuel Christian School.
But however it turns out, her experience surely tells us which orthodoxies
today are truly sacred and beyond question.
