What concerns me, though, is the possibility that Mr. Cook, and many of his fellow liberals, actually do understand what Jim Crow laws were, what the Indiana RFRA does, and still believe that a connection between the two is logical. What we’ve seen in American culture over the last few years is a tectonic shift in how many on the left think about the relationship between sexual politics and law. Emerging is a portrait of what my friend Alastair Roberts calls “New Morality.” New Morality is a specific narrative about human ethics, particularly the sexual kind, that places certain moral demands on all who want to participate in public life. The New Morality is specific about what must happen to those who refuse its worldview: They must relinquish the right to be heard.

New Morality is not liberalism, at least the way liberalism is often explained. Most social conservatives see the major threat of liberalism as permissiveness, the sanctioning of immoral or un-American behavior that threatens the social order. There’s still truth in that, of course, but New Morality is actually the opposite of permissiveness, it is prescription. It’s not quite right to think of New Morality liberalism as simply allowing too many things. Rather, by subjugating civil life to a set of postmodern doctrines about the autonomous self, it allows too few. Dissent has become heresy, and heresy cannot co-exist with the pure faith. We used to picture liberalism as pushing the boundaries of our conscience. New Morality liberalism has found an entirely new conscience, and seeks to shrink the margins, not expand them.

The belief that the Indiana RFRA is a license for discrimination is coherent only if one believes that offering any sort of legal recourse for businesses in discrimination lawsuits is itself intolerant. But that’s exactly where the times have taken us. We have arrived at a place where prominent columnists can speak openly about “stamping out” voices who disagree with New Morality. We see private Christian universities punished for hiring policies consistent with their charters and articles of faith. We see the personal lives of judges carefully screened and regulated for anti-New Morality activity. What is being created before our eyes is in no way secular. It is religion, and religious orthodoxy is the price of citizenship.

So then, we come back to the issue of what liberalism means. My question is: Who are today’s liberals? Who are the ones who will protest the creation of a state faith in New Morality and argue for the public inclusion of those with differing opinions? Who will widen the margins of civic life? Where are the true Jeffersons, the spokespeople for pluralism, the lovers of debate and of bottom-up cultural creation?

Can we find those liberals who defer to debate and persuasion rather than fiat and coercion? I’m afraid we have no choice. This isn’t about special protection for or the privileging of evangelicalism; it’s about recovering a sense of belonging for all in the public square. To be liberal is to believe that no social orthodoxy is ever worth more than freedom of conscience. That is precisely the conviction that is at risk today. Against this backdrop, Indiana’s RFRA is a fundamentally liberal law. The question is: Where are its liberal champions?