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The California Supreme Court ruled that doctors must provide reproductive services to lesbians despite religious objections. A Methodist camp in New Jersey lost its tax exemption after it told a lesbian couple they could have their commitment ceremony anywhere except in buildings that are used for religious services. The list goes on.

But the response to California's democratic vote publicized this clash between religious freedom and gay rights like never before. Folks who didn't have negative views of the gay rights movement have now been given cause to perceive an agenda that is at odds with the live-and-let-live image pushed by the media elite.

The attacks on Mormons, a small religious minority in California, were so bad that they provoked an unlikely collection of evangelicals, Jews, Catholics, human-rights activists, and civil libertarians to denounce the intimidation in a full-page New York Times ad.

"The last thing these folks needed was to give a reason for people who ordinarily wouldn't agree to be united," said Francis Beckwith, a philosophy professor at Baylor University.

Perhaps gay-rights activists might want to think before they force more people out of jobs for expressing their political and religious beliefs. As it is, their campaign of intimidation has been the best thing that could happen to proponents of traditional marriage.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a writer in Washington, D.C. She blogs for GetReligion.org.

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Christianity Today also has a special section on same-sex marriage.

Today, California's Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on whether Proposition 8 should be upheld. CT will cover developments on the politics blog.

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February 2009, Vol. 53, No. 2