Frank Bruni, former food-critic, current theological airhead, and gay-wrongs advocate at The New York Times proposes that Christians be forced to embrace the gay life-style, because it’s their choice to keep believing antiquated dogmas that go against science.

Get that? Bruni is turning the Christian argument that homosexuality is a moral choice back against Christians.

So our debate about religious freedom should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity,” Bruni writes.

Bruni’s piece quotes prominent gay furniture-maker and philanthropist Mitchell Gold who wants conservative Christians to abandon their beliefs:

Gold told me that church leaders must be made “to take homosexuality off the sin list.”

His commandment is worthy — and warranted. All of us, no matter our religious traditions, should know better than to tell gay people that they’re an offense. And that’s precisely what the florists and bakers who want to turn them away are saying to them.”

What a difficult choice for Christians.

On on hand, the commandment of Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead; who  has been worshiped as god by billions through the last 20 centuries; who was the fountain-head of some of the greatest artistic and scientific achievements of all time; who confirms moral teachings given by all the major faiths and by a preponderance of secular thinkers.

On the other hand, the querulous demand of a gay, anti-Christian crony- capitalist Yankee  from the center of the Democrat political machine, New Jersey:

For the past eight years, Gold, a secular Jew from New Jersey, has been conducting a one-man campaign against what he calls “religion-based bigotry”—the invocation of biblical authority to justify denying rights to Americans on the basis of their sexual orientation. It is, to his Yankee ear, directly analogous to the way Southern preachers once cited scripture to defend the Jim Crow system. “One of the things I’ve learned is that on the other side, there are a lot of good people, and they do not want to be bigots,” Gold told me when we first met this summer at the condo he and his husband, Tim, keep in Washington, D.C. “And unless we teach them that, in fact, they are bigots, they will never know that what they are doing is really harmful to people.”

Gold is among a growing number of corporate executives pouring resources into the cause of gay rights this year. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, pledged $2.5 million in support of same-sex marriage legislation in Washington state, and hedge-fund head Paul Singer has given $1 million to a Super PAC that supports pro-gay Republican candidates.

Yes,  a very tough call for Christians.

As Jonathan Merritt points out, coercion has always brought out the Christianity in Christians.

It will be no different in modern America:

Those who hope to direct Christianity’s future must comprehend its past. The world’s largest faith was built upon the ashes of martyrs and forged from the fires of persecution. And the narrative of oppression and struggle has united Christians throughout the centuries. To wit:

• The anonymous “Letter to Diognetus” (AD 80 – 200): “Christians…love all men, and are persecuted by all.”
• Augustine (AD 354 – 430): “If you see that you have not yet suffered tribulations, consider it certain that you have not begun to be a true servant of God.”
• Martin Luther (AD 1483 – 1546): “Men despise the Evangel and insist on being compelled by the law and the sword.”
• Dietrich Bonheoffer (AD 1906 – 1945): “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

Of course, Christians will not be killed today for refusing to comply.

They will merely lose their businesses and jobs; be refused public platforms; be ostracized by “polite” society and academia…..and even by “hip” preachers, clever enough to divorce Jesus from his message and claim the former, while abusing the latter.

It will be (as it has been) a moral martyrdom. of constant humiliation, ridicule, and libel hurled by the most powerful media ever to exist, one owned and operated by people suffering from never-extinguished spite against the teaching of Jesus Christ.

That, and not love of homosexuals, is what lies behind the pious sermons of today’s Yankee preachers.