This new Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has comes full circle in the military, too. The same service that once barred gays and lesbians from service now punishes chaplains who quote their scripture in dealing with questions of sex outside of traditional marriage. One case didn’t even involve sexual ethics at all; Navy Captain Joe Lawhorn received disciplinary action for explaining how he relies on Scripture to overcome depression, hardly a novel approach for any Christian minister.

For nearly twenty years, the US military pursued a policy with lesbians and gays in the armed forces known as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT). When originally formulated, it provided compromise between those who supported the historical ban on homosexuality in the military and those who wanted an immediate lifting of the ban in the name of equal treatment.

In practice, the DADT policy gave the military a transition period that lasted a generation, allowing the culture of the armed forces a time to adjust to the new political and cultural realities it would soon reflect. For those gays and lesbians in the military who chafed under the policy of silence and who occasionally lost careers for breaking it, it became an unconscionable act of censorship and dishonesty, an anathema in a society based on free expression and tolerance.

The DADT policy ended nearly four years ago, when the military formally lifted its ban on LGBT members. Tolerance, however, remains an elusive prospect, and not just in the military. Now the targets of enforced silence and outright shunning are people of religious faith whose tenets contradict the official positions of the Pentagon, and of state and federal governments. Those who ask or tell about those beliefs quickly find themselves the victims of official intolerance, sometimes directed from the highest levels of government.

This didn’t just start with last week’s ruling in Obergefell v Hodges, in which the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The decision did inspire opponents of religious doctrines that cast sex of any sort outside of sacramental marriage as a sin to ramp up their efforts to narrow religious liberty to the smallest possible context. For instance, Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) told MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki that the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion only extends as far as the outside walls of houses of worship.

“Certainly the First Amendment says that in institutions of faith that there is absolute power to observe deeply held religious beliefs,” Baldwin explained, “but I don’t think it extends far beyond that.”  Baldwin objected to the idea that religious liberty applies to the manner in which Americans choose to live their lives. “They’re talking about expanding this far beyond our churches and synagogues to businesses and individuals across this country,” she warned. “I think there are clear limits that have been set in other contexts and we ought to abide by those in this new context across America.”

Read More