Rod Dreher Explains His Christian Principles

Appearances matter, politically.

Hmmm, let's see...which way are the winds of public opinion blowing today?

With friends like these [picture of Mike Huckabee], religious liberty needs no enemies

Now, let's keep in mind Rod Dreher is a blogger, pundit, memoirist, ::coughanonymouscatholicfifthcolumnistcough:: and, most recently, to help ends meet, a ghost writer, while frenemy of religious liberty Mike Huckabee is a magna cum laude college graduate, Baptist minister, former Governor of Arkansas, and former and current presidential candidate.

So clearly Huckabee's qualifications to speak on religious liberty and politics are not at all on a par with Rod's.

What I’m trying to get you to understand is how the Kim Davis thing looks to many people who don’t live inside your bubble. Appearances matter, politically.

Appearances also matter desperately if one is trying to beat the bushes to drum up support for one's signature Benedict Option, a proposition rooted ultimately in Christian hopelessness and despair about the world we live in.

A county clerk fighting back against a Supreme Court decision, even futilely, a social conservative running for the Presidency unapologetically as a social conservative - these things are like garlic to a vampire with respect to any sort of immediacy needed to drive interest in a book about your last, only Benedict Option.

As long as other Christians are taking a stand, any drehery Benedict Option dhimmitude is always something one can think about mañana.

Well, clearly mañana won't put any Benedict Option book wine and oysters into our ghost writer's belly any time soon, so just as clearly any blade of resistant grass that dares raise its head on the barren plains of Benedict Option despair can dependably count on being immediately Millmaned as thoroughly as possible.

Because, you know, appearances matter, politically.

A question that interests me in the wake of Obergefell

Rather than hang another comment on Pik's post where it would be diversionary anyway, I'm just going to start a new thread to focus on it. I picked this excerpt from Chief Justice Roberts' dissent from Ann Althouse's blog (she favors SSM). The empasis is mine.

The fundamental right to marry does not include a right to make a State change its definition of marriage. And a State’s decision to maintain the meaning of marriage that has persisted in every culture throughout human history can hardly be called irrational. In short, our Constitution does not enact any one theory of marriage. The people of a State are free to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, or to retain the historic definition.

This is obviously 10th Amendment territory. But my specific question is this. Let's say a state - Alabama might be the likeliest candidate - just says, yeah, we agree with Roberts. We're just going to keep our historic definition. Not sue, mind you, simply ignore Obergefell entirely. Terrible precedent, to be sure, and Roy Moore could expect some absolutely devastating Tweets.

But, really, what happens next? Paratroopers? Hardly. Economic sanctions? What? Against whom or what?

In short, what could a state actually suffer for simply ignoring Obergefell and not recognizing SSM?