At the time of the Founding, slaveholders recognized that slavery contradicted the principles of the Declaration of Independence—Jefferson and others repeated that slavery was wrong—but they pleaded for toleration in dealing with a condition that they could not immediately and fully set right. Over time they stopped seeking mere toleration, began defending slavery as a “positive good,” and objected to any public policy that implied its wrongness. The most radical of them, like George Fitzhugh, argued that slavery was a better social system than free labor.

The pro-homosexual movement has followed a similar trajectory, from toleration to equality to supremacy.

The homosexual-rights movement has long claimed the civil rights movement as its model. But its increasingly strident effort to suppress all moral and religious dissent makes it look more like the antebellum proslavery movement. Some years ago one wit observed that homosexuality, once “the love that dare not speak its name,” had become “the love that can’t shut up.” We cannot let it shut everybody else up.