The Ideological and Theological Philosophy of Erick Erickson
He started with a piece claiming that religious freedom and legal gay marriage are incompatible. How can this be, you may ask, for many churches believe in gay marriage and would like to perform them legally? And how can this be, when it’s been long established that churches don’t have to marry anyone—such as divorced people—that they don’t want to marry? Well, you need to heavily tweak your definition of “religious freedom”.
Already we have seen florists, bakers, and photographers suffer because they have refused to go along with the cultural shift toward gay marriage. There will be more.
By “attacked”, he means “heavily criticized”. So, apparently Erickson believes that religious freedom means that other people are not allowed to hold, much less express, a critical opinion of anything a person calls their “faith”. The problem with this is that religions criticize each other. In fact, in this very same post, Erickson writes this:
The Christian Left would prefer to view Matthew 19 as a passage on divorce, which is discussed. But they willfully ignore Christ’s definition of what a marriage is — one man and one woman united to become one.
By his own definition, he violated the religious freedom of the Christian Left by criticizing their views. Clearly, this is a conundrum, one that can only be solved by making a fundamentalist, conservative definition of Christianity the official state religion—whose freedom must be preserved by censoring all criticism of it—and declaring everyone else heretics. This is “religious freedom”, right wing style.