In the days after a mass shooting event, you can predict that certain things will happen like clockwork: sales of handguns and semi-auto rifles jump through the roof, Congress holds another moment of silence and then does nothing else, and the NRA waits 24 hours and then publishes a denunciation of President Obama and of any form of gun control that is notable in each missive being slightly more unhinged as they progress.

Rod Dreher has unhappily added to this sorry state of affairs by making this atrocity about him and how he is being repressed. It was funny when done by Monty Python. Rod Dreher’s version, well, not so much.

Yesterday, Dreher wrote:

Another reader sends this outrageous column by CBC senior correspondent Neil Macdonald, in which he implicates all conservative religious believers in the Orlando mass murder.

You expect to see writers for Salon, Slate, Vox and other left-wing sites making that argument. But a US Congressman saying that if you oppose transgenders in girls’ locker rooms, you’re complicit with mass murder? It’s beyond disgusting….

The assault on orthodox Christians in particular and religious liberty in general will become much more intense. There can be no doubt at all that if Hillary Clinton becomes president, it will be turned into federal policy. Mark my words: under a Clinton administration, the IRS will be used to deny the tax-exempt status of Christian colleges that don’t capitulate.

Most conservative Christians I know find Donald Trump to be an excrescence. But as the attacks on Christians mount, and the campaign to demonize religious liberty as cover for hatred goes into overdrive, they will have to consider more carefully whether or not to vote for Trump as a matter of self-protection.

Every conservative Christian I know who has told me he or she is voting for Trump, despite everything, has said fear of what Clinton will do to religious liberty is at the heart of their decision. I get that. Boy, do I get that. And this week, it’s becoming ever clearer.

*emphasis added.

It’s a nice trick. Turn an attack on a group you despise into an attack on you…and then blame that same group for why you have to vote for a racist proto-fascist(!) Better still, define religious liberty for yourself as I win in all cultural things and the rest of you had better toe the line or else.

Dreher couldn’t leave it there, though.

The term “Reichstag fire” refers to the 1933 arson at the German parliament building, committed by at least one communist. Hitler, the new chancellor, did not let this crisis go to waste. He took advantage of the outrage over the attack to push for sweeping laws suppressing communists, the Nazis’ political rivals. In this sense, Orlando is a “Reichstag fire” event, I predict, because it is a genuine and appalling atrocity that will lead to the demonization, in law and in custom, of orthodox Christians and any who disagree with whatever LGBTs and their allies want.

It’s going to happen. Social and religious conservatives had better get ready for it.

It is certainly true that Christians who hate gays and abuse them are sinning and should repent. But what is “victimization”? Does that include opposing same-sex marriage, or transgender bathroom bills? Does it include affirming what the Roman Catholic church teaches about homosexuality? That’s how people are taking the bishop’s remarks. Here’s Zack Ford at Think Progress, spurning the prayers and good wishes of Baptist leader Russell Moore, because Moore upholds the biblical view of sexuality…

What Ford and those who agree with him are doing is demanding that we give up what we believe to be true, or nothing we say about love, respect, and the rest of it matters.

I believe this will be the line that emerges out of Orlando. And the campaign will happen because it’s in the playbook. GLSEN has over the years managed to get its teaching programs mainstreamed in schools under the guise of stopping bullying and making schools “safe.” The stated theory is that if you really want to stop bullying, you will teach children that there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. That is to say, it’s not enough that kids be taught respect and tolerance; kids must be taught that what orthodox Christianity says is not only wrong, but by implication makes schools unsafe.

It has been an extraordinarily successful campaign. And we are about to see it scaled up to the national level. Any Republican politician, and any religious leader, who opposes what the LGBT activists and their allies in the Democratic Party want is going to be tarred as having the blood of Orlando victims on their hands.

I anticipate the comments to this post: “How dare you worry about how this is going to affect your community when we haven’t even buried the victims yet?!” And that reaction, however inadvertently, is part of the campaign. Zack Ford, Rep. Beyer, Bishop Lynch and others are using the Orlando atrocity to advance goals, political and religious. I don’t doubt their sincerity. Nor do I doubt, not for one second, how effective they are going to be.

Now we will see the price individual Christians are willing to pay to remain faithful. Now we will see how many Christians have the inner strength to obey Jesus’s command: “But I say to you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which spitefully use you, and persecute you.”

49 dead in Orlando, and Rod Dreher can feel the nails through his wrists and ankles before the blood has even dried in the nightclub. Civil rights for people he doesn’t like becomes a personal assault on his liberty and his religion. Every physical attack on a person like me is actually a crisis in waiting to actually be used against him, because of course. Any call for basic civility after this atrocity is an attack on his speech. Even an anodyne call for LGBT employment protection is an attack on Christian business owners.

The term for this, believe, is narcissistic paranoia.

Of course, he still has to work in a plug for his upcoming book.

When I talk about the need for the Benedict Option, this is part of what I mean

Yes, Rod. We know. At the end of the day, you want to have your own little communitarian theocracy where you can police your neighbor’s sex lives:

“Individualism says basically that you do what you want to do and let other people do what they want to do,” she said. “People are more willing to accept behaviors they have no wish to engage in. There’s more of a sense of, you know, I need to do what’s right for me.”

Read the whole thing. It really is Anthony Kennedy’s world:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

Justice Kennedy, in those 1992 words, stated something that is at the core of the modern American sensibility. It is past time for conservatives to get over our tic of blaming every social change we don’t like on the judiciary. I agree entirely that the Supreme Court has been, on balance, a malevolent force for destructive social change. But we can now see that Justice Kennedy was more in touch with America than we were, and are.

This story is yet another milestone in the moral disintegration and cultural collapse of America. But you knew I would say that.

And he wonders why he isn’t a good fit for American notions of freedom, fair play and civil rights.