“Although public opinion has been moving rapidly in favor of same sex marriage, a recent AP-GfK poll found that most Americans thought it was even more important to protect religious liberties when they conflict with gay marriage. Indeed, there should be room to accomplish both.”

Perhaps you have missed it amid all the heated rhetoric about gay marriage, but seemingly serious people have proposed that henceforth Almighty God—or at least God’s people and churches—must keep up with modern times. In order to advance same-sex marriage appropriately and constitutionally, conservative Christians, Orthodox Jews and Muslims must get over their commitment to ancient doctrines and ideas and drag God into the liberal paradigm of the twenty-first century.

Frank Bruni, columnist for the New York Times, wrote that Christians should rightly “[bow] to the enlightenments of modernity.” Bruni favorably quoted businessman and gay philanthropist Mitchell Gold who said church leaders must be made to “take homosexuality off the sin list” (as though that list is invented and maintained by man, not God). Hillary Clinton, speaking of reproductive care and safe childbirth at the Women in the World Summit, said “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Even the Archbishop of Dublin, following the recent gay marriage vote in Ireland, said the church needed to do a “reality check” to see whether it had “drifted completely away from young people” today (is it really the church that is drifting, or young people and public opinion?).

And so we face a new challenge to religious liberty as codified in the First Amendment (free exercise of religion): one may freely exercise religion so long as it is in harmony with the spirit and understanding of the modern age. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the laws apparently now trumps the First Amendment free exercise of religion in that Christians and others may not freely exercise a religion that is not consonant with modern understandings and social practices.

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