California Can Now Jail People For Misusing Gender Pronouns

C.S. Lewis once remarked that “When the modern world says to us aloud, “You may be religious when you are alone,” it adds under its breath, “and I will see to it that you never are alone.” To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow’s end or the Greek calends. That is one of the enemy’s stratagems.”

Christianity has been getting airbrushed from the public square for a few decades now, as Richard John Neuhaus noted in The Naked Public Square.

In recent years there has been a concerted effort to reduce the Christian religion, which has consequences for every area and sphere of life, to that of private opinion.  Thus freedom of religion has been reduced to ‘freedom of worship.’

In one stroke, Christianity has been said to be banished from the public square.  Of course, at the same time, with the advent of the internet and its all-pervasive intrusion into our lives, it means that the public square is now effectively everywhere.

And thus the ‘freedom of worship’ will be yet further reduced to one’s private thoughts, never to be publicly expressed.

The totalitarian coercive speech legislation that has just appeared in California is in step with the same sort of draconian coercive speech practices to which Dr. Jordan Peterson has made such strenuous objection.  Peterson has rightly reasoned that it smacks of totalitarian thought to tell people what they must say, and has no place in a free society.

He could not be more correct.  The question is whether that free society is going to exist.  If the public will tolerate this sort of legislation, it soon will not.